


Lethe

by brigantines



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alien Biology, Alien Sex, Amnesia, Body Dysphoria, Eggs, F/M, Harems, Implied Mpreg, M/M, Mermaids, Mind Control, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Oviposition, Sexual Slavery, Xenophilia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-28
Updated: 2018-01-23
Packaged: 2018-10-12 00:09:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10477671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brigantines/pseuds/brigantines
Summary: On that first night in Queen Luxia's palace, Lance isn't rescued.





	1. 1.

The air-breathers came with nets and stun devices and their awful mechanical beasts, looming over the light and warmth of his home. The Queen sent her warriors to fight, and ordered him into the most protected caves along with the rest of the harem and the children of the palace, who clung to him and wept softly as bits of rock and coral drifted down around them, shaken free by the violent struggles outside. The great guardian of the depths, the blue mer-cat that only stirred in times of great distress, remained silent and inert, deaf to all of his desperate prayers.

The invaders have mer-cats themselves, the guards whispered, shaken. Perhaps they cannot fight each other. Perhaps they have come to reclaim their lost kin.

Queen Luxia had told them all the stories about the great mer-cat that had fallen from the stars and drifted down to their home. It was a sacred creature, she’d said. Its skin was metal but it was alive, and it would only heed the prayers of a special citizen. She said its arrival had woken Lance out of his long fevered illness, the one that had taken so much of his memory, and she knew then that he must be its chosen bride.

Being the bride of a mer-cat was not unlike becoming an attendant for the Baku Garden. Lance was given a set of rooms in the palace among the harem, made up of the Queen’s egg-bearers and the loveliest Garden maidens. He had servants of his own to take care of his every need, dined on the finest delicacies and wore ornate jewelry denoting the Queen’s favor, and had all the society of his sisters and brothers in the harem. They were not allowed out of the palace unescorted but sometimes small parties would sneak out, Lance among them, and they would chase each other through the glowing coral mazes and the kelp forests. He was envied for his unique connection to the mer-cat, for his lovely dusky skin and the glossy color of his scales, polished daily with sea sponges and rubbed with ointments, and his sisters whispered jealously that they would like him to carry their eggs, though they all knew that right belonged to Queen Luxia. 

They stole kisses under the cover of darkness, pressing their fingers knowingly to his flat, empty stomach and the sweet ache of his breeding slit, teasing him, teasing each other, enjoying the illicit pleasures of mating without eggs. They dared each other to tempt the embraces of the guards’ seahorse mounts, the bull dolphins, even the sharks and the swimming lizards, his harem sisters bold and shameless, egging him on, all of them attracted by the thrill as much as the gratification of the act. During the cold nights he curled up with his pregnant harem brothers to keep their egg-swollen bellies warm, envying their luxurious, radiant fins and their contented smiles. He liked the safety of nesting together, of bodies pressing warm around him, sheltering and being sheltered. It felt familiar, somehow. 

Trembling in the arms of his harem-siblings, Lance had to watch as the invaders broke past all their defenses and breached the Queen’s inner sanctum. They were strange, tailless creatures, intimidating and alien, only able to maneuver underwater with the propulsion systems affixed to their armor. Their voices rang muffled and metallic from inside their helmets. It was obvious how they had navigated the deepest parts of the palace so quickly; they were accompanied by the cave-dweller traitors, who cried out in misguided triumph when they caught sight of the terrified harem. There was no chance to flee. All of the exits were quickly blocked by enemies, who carried net-launchers and bizarre looking weapons.

“That one,” a cave-dweller said, pointing directly at Lance. “That’s the Queen’s favorite.” 

Outside, a deafening roar echoed through the water, something bigger than the voices of the mer-cats, which snarled back in unified defiance. The blue mer-cat was awake, was moving, Lance could feel that strange dissonance in his head that always happened when the mer-cat began to stir. Distant screams erupted from outside the palace, along with horrible metallic scraping sounds, and the bedrock of the ground all around them quivered. Lance’s sisters and brothers wept and wailed in terror as the air-breathers broke out into yelling, and one of them was coming towards him, the big golden one, calling his name.

Lance thrust the pregnant little brother he’d been sheltering behind him, flaring his fins wide to make himself look larger and baring his fangs. The gold armored air-breather kept advancing, holding out its arms and saying things that didn’t make any sense, until the other one, the small green one, yelled something about the Baku Garden and running out of time, and raised a net-launcher. Lance lunged frantically towards the gold creature and the open entrance at its back, snapping ferociously as it grabbed for him, but he was too slow: the heavy black folds of the net encircled him, tangling his arms and tail, pulling him down. He struggled in a blind panic, terror swamping him, thrashing wildly. He barely heard the argument over his head, barely felt the prick of the hypo, but he felt his limbs becoming heavy and sluggish, an awful gray fog stealing over him. He sank down to the floor, helpless, gills fluttering weakly, his last view the terrified faces of his siblings as the big, grasping hands of the air-breathers reached down towards him.

* * *

When he woke up, he was somewhere else.

The saltwater that flowed through his gills and over his tongue tasted different, lesser, a strange combination of minerals completely different from the waters of his home. It was artificially warm, without the currents of hot and cold he expected from a living ocean, and he raised his head groggily to find himself curled on a shallow, sloping ledge, unnaturally smooth. Deeper water stirred beneath his tail, but there was only a few feet of water above his head. He recoiled instinctively, pushing himself off the ledge to sink to the bottom, hiding against the perfectly smooth curve of the wall. 

He was in a pool. Or rather, he was in a pool that someone had taken pains to reconstruct as an aquarium, as his eyes slowly adjusted to the painfully bright light. The walls and floor were smooth and white, set with softly glowing blue tiles, a vast empty shallow space that at once made him feel claustrophobic and too exposed. There were a few objects rising up from the white floor that he recognized as ill-fitting additions; furniture, apparently, had been thrown in. A scattering of large, egg shaped chairs, two or three things that might have begun life as couches or sleeping berths, even several stands of artificial plants. A waving patch of kelp had been transplanted, its holdfast anchors still affixed to individual pieces of rock, and there were a couple bright, darting flashes of color amidst the floating leaves. Fish, also transplanted. 

The kelp patch was barely large enough to hide inside, but he couldn’t help himself. A flick of his aching tail propelled him instantly into the familiar shelter of the waving green-brown fronds, which stretched all the way to the surface only a few meters above, but he immediately felt better once he was safely surrounded. It was the only area of the pool that tasted alive. He let himself drift down to the bottom among the boulder chunks, huddled in on himself and shivering despite the warmth of the water, watching the little fish dart fretfully above him.

He had been kidnapped by air-breathers. He was in a giant aquarium, a fake habitat, and he was alone.

Every muscle hurt. There was a funny taste in the back of his throat and a particular raspiness to his tongue and his scales that told him he’d been out of the water for a long time, long enough to dry out completely. He felt unkempt, scraped up, his fins abraded and ragged, and most of his fine jewelry was either missing or broken. Scattered pearls and polished beads winked at him from the floor of the pool until he mustered shaking fingers to find the trailing ends of his necklaces and bracelets and tie them off. He collected every broken piece he could find, piling them together fretfully in a small, shiny pyramid.

Inspecting himself, he discovered tiny circular marks on his arms where he’d been pricked repeatedly by something sharp. The air-breathers had taken blood samples, skin samples, even pulled out a few of his scales, unless he’d lost them struggling with the net. He wasn’t trailing blood in the water, but he could smell unattractive traces of himself: sickness, injury, poor self-care. There were even a few thin, scummy patches of algae growing on his scales and he snatched a floating, broken piece of kelp frond to scrub himself in disgust. 

He was hungry, too. The last meal he’d eaten in the company of Queen Luxia seemed like a lifetime ago, floating safe and warm at her side, obediently opening his mouth for the tiny bites of delicious food she fed to him. It had been a celebration for the successful impregnation of one of her egg-bearers, and all of the harem had been overjoyed. The Queen had smiled kindly at Lance’s own poorly disguised yearning, promising him that someday he would carry her eggs. 

He hugged himself tightly, his tail coiled around his body, trying to hold onto the memory of feeling so protected, but it flowed through his fingers like silt. He felt raw and sharp-edged, as though the security of his life in the palace had only been a dream, and he was now awake. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling.

Fitful, restless naps carried him through most of that first day, not moving from his protected spot at the bottom of the kelp patch. The wavering surface far above him seemed ominous and upsetting so he kept his head down, kept himself coiled into the smallest silhouette he could manage. There were no currents to sweep him from his sanctuary but he used his tail to anchor himself around a kelp strand, huddling miserably underneath its waving shadow. 

Hunger eventually drove him awake, so he broke off a kelp frond and nibbled it, grimacing at the texture. Steamed kelp leaves were delicious when they were tender and young, but eaten raw the leaves were tediously chewy. He found mussels still attached to the boulders and healthy sea snails inching along some of the kelp strands, and made a count of all of them, reflexively calculating how many he ought to cultivate to keep a population going. He could eat kelp and snails and fish and bivalves, if his captors didn’t plan to feed him. The kelp patch would grow. 

He thought regretfully of the bounties of the Baku Garden, the delicious flavors and ripe vegetation, and experienced hunger pangs so sharp they were like a knife twisting in his gut. He wanted to eat one more meal from the Garden more than he wanted his freedom or his questions answered, suddenly. If only he had some of it here, he could be content. 

He shook his head to clear that thought. Far above him, the high ceiling of the pool room had been built with some type of transparent material, for he could see the endless blackness of space and the scattered white diamonds of stars. He wasn’t anywhere near his ocean, anymore. He wasn’t even on the planet. 

As the soreness faded from his limbs he made cautious circuits of the pool, looking at the furniture and exploring the limits of his prison, careful to stay as near the bottom as possible. He didn’t find any sort of observatory windows set into the walls or floor of the pool itself, although there were objects set into the smooth walls that might have been sensors or cameras. He scratched one experimentally with his claws and didn’t even make a mark. The walls and floor seemed to be stone, or some substance equivalent to it, and the heat that kept the pool warm seemed to radiate evenly from the walls rather than hot water being pumped in from some outside source. 

He dragged one of the egg shaped chairs into the middle of his kelp patch and moved the boulder chunks into a wider radius, encouraging new tendrils of kelp to grow the way his sisters had taught him, removing snails and other grazing invertebrates. He discovered a handful of spiny urchins ravenously devouring a kelp stem and pried them loose with the help of a shard of rock, setting them aside for dinner, but he found even after the briefest physical exertion he was tired and shaky and faintly nauseated, as if recovering from an illness. Half of a small kelp frond was all he could manage before he curled up inside his egg chair, tipped on its side and covered in a hastily woven kelp blanket. It wasn’t a cave, or the comfort of his nest in the seraglio, but he had no intention of swimming back to the carved lounging ledges near the surface where anything could reach down and grab him in such shallow waters. 

When he woke again the pool was very dark, the little glow tiles muted to almost nothing and the overhead lights turned off. It was dark enough to see his own faint pattern of bioluminescence and he felt more comfortable immediately, knowing that nothing looking down from the surface would be able to see him as anything more than a quick, darting shadow. 

Then he heard the noise. His head jerked up, clutching his blanket closer around his shoulders. A voice, above the water, speaking low and steadily. 

Lance crept out from his makeshift nest, keeping the blanket around his shoulders as a cloak to camouflage his movements, and carefully pulled himself up along the largest kelp strand, keeping his body as still as possible and letting the drifting fronds hide him. As close to the surface as he dared, he wrapped his tail firmly around the stalk and peered out.

An air-breather was standing waist deep in one of the shallow sections. It-- he-- was out of his armor, but Lance recognized it as the gold one who had tried to reach for him in the palace. He was holding something that reflexively made Lance’s mouth water. A tray, a serving tray laden with food that steamed even in the humid air. He couldn’t smell it, but he was hungry enough to imagine that it was delicious, piping hot and rich.

“Hey, buddy,” the air-breather was saying quietly, his gaze scanning the dark surface of the water as if he had any chance of spotting Lance. “I know this is really weird right now, and I know you’re probably freaked out, but we’re all your friends here. You’re safe. We rescued you, I don’t know if you know that. Um, it might not seem that way to you right now? You totally tried to bite my face off, that was terrifying.”

 _Liars, kidnappers,_ Lance wanted to yell back, pressing his lips together hard. He let himself breach the surface underneath his kelp cloak, the fronds hanging over his hair and his face, just a ragged clump of vegetation floating on the surface in the middle of other ragged clumps of vegetation. 

“Anyway, I brought you some dinner. I know you’re probably starving, we had to-- pump your stomach, it was super gross, but we had to get all that mind-altering junk out of your system. I’ll tell you about it when you’re feeling better, you’re gonna want some distance between right now and hearing about the stuff they were feeding you. So… come and get it? Soup’s on? I mean, it’s not soup, I didn’t make soup, figured it’d be hard for you to eat soup underwater-- but I could make you soup! If you wanted. If you let me know.”

The air-breather paused, as if waiting for a response. The tiny water sounds of the pool filled the silence. Lance didn’t move at all, anchored and safe. 

“Lance?” 

Silence.

After a long moment, the air-breather sighed softly, his broad shoulders seeming to droop. He stopped searching the water and sloshed a few steps back towards the edge of the pool, setting down the tray of food. Lance couldn’t help fixating on it, biting his lip, his gills fluttering. He hoped the air-breather left quickly before the food went cold. 

“I’m sorry, okay.” The air-breather ran a hand through his hair, tugging at the ends. “I’m sorry that I didn’t figure out anything was wrong, that we both bought into the ‘we’re all safe and warm here’ stuff, I’m sorry I got rescued from the Queen by the jellyfish heads and you didn’t, I’m sorry I built a beacon to get in touch with everybody and waited for them to show up before we came to rescue you. I’m sorry that she had time to mess with your memories. I’m sorry you’ve got a fish tail-- Coran’s working on that, he said he can reverse it, probably. I’m sorry I didn’t come get you. I know-- I know that you would’ve come to get me.”

There was a large pack sitting near the edge of the pool. The air-breather reached inside and pulled out some kind of small device, setting it down near the serving tray. “Here. You’re not gonna remember what this is either, but just push the button. It’ll play a message for you from the-- from your Queen, uh, Queen Luxia.”

Lance’s tail jerked involuntarily, startling the small fish that had come near to investigate his presence. From his mistress? 

The air-breather was retreating from the water now, making his noisy way up the staircase entrance to the pool. He grabbed a towel and slung it around his shoulders but left the rucksack, the tray of food, and the device. He hesitated before he reached the outer door-- Lance could see it required a handprint, meaning he was locked in here-- but didn’t turn around to search the water. He simply left.

He would be back, Lance was sure, unwinding his tail slowly from the kelp stalk and drifting closer to the pool staircase and the tempting tray of food. He’d seemed genuinely upset, even though all of his words sounded like nonsense to Lance. The air-breathers were strangers and they’d abducted him from his home, from his Queen. They’d caught him with a net and made him sleep with drugs and dragged him away from his ocean. That was not a rescue. 

The water was much shallower near the staircase, the glowing tiles more than enough light to illuminate him even with his kelp camouflage. He let his head break the surface carefully and soundlessly, listening hard, scanning the room in all directions. There were windows, further, huge floor to ceiling affairs set into the white walls, and the only thing visible through them was an endless starfield. There was no one else present, nothing else moving, and the exit door was far enough away from the pool that Lance thought he’d have time to dive back to the safety of the kelp patch before anyone could get close to the water. 

The humid air still felt cool on his wet skin as he crept up the pool stairs, ‘walking’ with his hands, his shoulders and upper torso pushed above the water. His nostrils flared at the tantalizing scent of the food and he snaked out his arm quickly, snatching up a handful of warm, doughy wraps. He crammed two into his mouth before he realized he should’ve opened them, checked them for anything weird, but he was so hungry and they were so good, filled with familiar textures and flavors that he couldn’t quite place but knew were from good memories, from the foggy, dim spaces before his fever. 

There were other things on the tray as well. A container of freshwater that he frowned at, not understanding the purpose of it. Some kind of alien fruit with a leathery skin that he had to peel off before he could get to the tangy, pulpy flesh inside. It didn’t taste familiar but it was good, and he ate it down to the rind. There was also another doughy cylinder of a different sort, small and bright yellow, enveloped in some kind of clear crinkly wrap that reminded him of a jelly hide, if jellies could be dried out and crinkly. He sniffed at the spongy, slightly sticky thing critically and then licked it, deciding its sweetness designated it a dessert. He ate a cautious mouthful and discovered the inside was packed full of an astonishingly sugary white cream; the rest he devoured in two bites. 

Then there was the alien device. Lance stared at it suspiciously for a long moment, nibbling on the last wrap to stretch out the flavor, and chose to investigate the rucksack that had also been left behind. It wasn’t close enough to the water for him to reach easily, he was forced to slither up the steps on his belly and stretch himself out over the nasty dry hard surface to try and hook a strap and pull it closer. He winced, feeling his scales rasp over the rough floor. A good yank brought the heavy pack close to the steps and the lip of the pool and Lance hurriedly sank back down into the water, hating the vulnerable feeling of beaching himself.

The rucksack was not full, but there was a random assortment of items inside, from strange air-breather clothing to a handful of things that looked like personal items. There were fuzzy fabric things that vaguely resembled the blue mer-cat, two of them, with strange holes in their tops that he couldn’t fathom the purpose of. A device covered in buttons that played music, soft and faint. A container of some kind of cool, thick cream that smelled strongly of odd chemicals and didn’t taste appetizing at all when he dabbed a dot of it on his tongue. Many of the items seemed to share a color-coding; they were the same shade of blue as the guardian of the depths. 

His shoulders hunched. The guardian had not saved him from being captured. He wondered if the mer-cat had also been caught with nets, dragged out of the ocean. He’d felt too ill and weak to try the meditative trance that let him connect more intimately with the guardian, and none of his frantic prayers about wanting to _go home_ had brought him a response. Perhaps it couldn’t hear him anymore. 

At the bottom of the pack was something he recognized and recoiled from instantly: an air-breather weapon, looking small and innocent for something he knew very well was dangerous. He’d seen the golden one and the green one transform theirs. The green one had shot glowing ropes. 

This one was blue, and despite his better judgment he reached back in to poke at it warily. Why was it the same color as the blue mer-cat? He poked at it again, harder, and then it was in his palm, his fingers wrapping easily around the hilt. It fit his hand like it had been measured for him.

Unsettled, he put the rest of the items back into the bag. The weapon he kept, pulling loose a few strands of kelp from his cloak and braiding them together to make a belt he could attach the weapon to, securing it tightly at his side. What he needed was a knife and some other tools, but there had been no utensils accompanying the food, and the pack didn’t have much in the way of useful underwater items, not even a polishing sponge. He stole a few containers and a tiny mirror to bring down to his place between the kelp rocks, and then spitefully took the food tray as well. It was a dull silver color, not very shiny, but it was something to look at that wasn’t the bland white of the pool bottom. Lance set the tray down on the floor of the pool near one of the boulders and arranged some of the more colorful sea snails on it.

Then he went for the alleged message device. He pulled himself up on the steps of the pool, cradling the small thing in his hands. It was about the size of his closed fist, white and oddly stream-lined, and covered in tiny blue lights that followed the movement of his finger. Continuous pressure created something like a menu screen, and a blinking symbol.

He pressed it. 

A few minutes later the device settled gently to the bottom of the pool while Lance fled to the shelter of his egg-cave, pulling the kelp cloak around himself tightly and over his head to block out all the light, pressing both hands over his mouth to muffle the awful keening noises he was making. Florona, given to the Garden. The harem sisters he’d known, the attendants, who had gone missing while he stayed safe and warm in the palace, lulled into complacency, never thinking to question their absence. 

His mistress’s voice trembles as she tells him that she is sorry for what she has done to him. That the blue mer-cat was his, that it fell from the stars and sank beneath the waves with him clasped gently between its teeth, dazed and injured. She says she is proud that he helped her defend her people against other threats, even under the influence of the Garden, that he would have been a marvelous bearer for her eggs, and that she misses him, but that it was right he should be returned to his people. She hopes that he will recover. She hopes that someday he will forgive her. 

The message continued unheard at the bottom of the pool as he curled himself tightly into a ball and screamed.


	2. Chapter 2

The lights were on the next morning.

Lance stared dully at the inside of the egg chair. It was dim underneath his kelp but the bright lights had turned on all at once, indicating a timer to mark the beginning of the day. For the whole ship, he thought absently. For his ship, the air-breather ship that he belonged to, with its floors he couldn’t walk and its doors he couldn’t open. 

The sea snails had all crawled off of his silver tray. He could see their determined trails over its edges, onto the white floor, heading slowly but surely back to the kelp strands. There were probably more destructive sea urchins to discover among the fronds. There were things to do. 

The message player device sat on the bottom of the pool like an ominous predator. Like the Baku Garden, inert, innocuous, and wholly capable of destroying a life. 

Lance closed his eyes and tried to fall back asleep. He didn’t want to think, he didn’t want to leave the safety of his nest. He heard voices later, far above him, even a few distant splashing sounds of someone entering the water, but he didn’t stir, and nothing came down to disturb him. He thought of the air-breathers-- no, the _humans,_ the Voltron Paladins and their two Altean companions-- inexorably draining the pool of all the saltwater, forcing him to reveal himself, turning over the egg chair to find him like a worm hiding beneath a rock. 

When the lights finally dimmed for evening he was so hungry he could barely think. He considered eating a kelp piece from the edge of his ragged cloak so that he wouldn’t have to leave his nest, and then was disgusted enough with himself to throw aside his camouflage and swim up to the surface without it, not caring if anyone saw. They were his people, weren’t they? They had lost him and then found him. 

There was another tray of food waiting for him. The rucksack was still there, but had been moved just enough that he knew they knew that he’d gone through it. 

There was also another message device. Lance ignored it and grabbed the entire tray in one savage motion, diving back underwater. The foods began to float away, messy and disintegrating, the breaded things dissolving into a mushy, nasty mess as he tried to eat them underwater. Human food, meant for humans, meant to be eaten dry. The little fish came to dart around him in a swirling cloud, eagerly sucking up the tiny edible particles. The only thing spared was another food inside a crinkle wrapping that Lance knew he’d have to take to the surface to eat, and the container of freshwater that bobbed up to the surface like so much useless garbage. 

He let the tray fall to the bottom and took the brightly colored crinkle bag with him down to his nest, hiding it in the curve of the egg chair. Who knew if it was waterproof for any amount of time. He cracked open an urchin and one of the larger snails with a rock and ate them raw, hiding from the words floating around in his brain. Uni sashimi. Escargot. Sushi bars, French restaurants. Men in white hats with knives. Butter sizzling in black pans over black stoves on television. He was still hungry. He chewed kelp fronds angrily, resenting, thinking of the grand feasts that the palace had served. Fish and molluscs, seaweed wraps, crustaceans, the spongy ripe fruits and delicious seagrass stalks that the Baku Garden produced.

They ate the Garden, the Garden ate them, he thought wildly, and scared the little fish away with his bark of faintly hysterical laughter. 

By the next morning, the floating garbage had been cleaned up and there was another tray by the stairs, this one full of breakfast foods in multiple bowls as if to make up for what he’d wasted the day before. More fruits, and a heavy mug full of a brightly colored liquid that he couldn’t identify. 

The mug was the same blue as the weapon he still wore, and he resisted the irrational, impulsive urge to smash it. It was probably his. He didn’t remember it at all. There hadn’t been any mugs in the ocean, or anything needing a mug. Liquids were hard to work with underwater, they had to be handled at the surface or in the underwater caves and carried in sealed containers, usually only big enough for one sustained swallow. Ocean creatures didn’t need to drink. They got their hydration from their food or by filtering the saltwater directly. 

He left it and the rest of the tray untouched, save for one piece of soft, ripe fruit, which he hefted in his hand, gauging, and then hurled to splat against the wall next to the door. He’d wanted the door itself, or maybe the console. 

The fruit burst on impact, juice flying everywhere, the bulk of its flesh sliding down limply and leaving a nice messy stain on the clean white wall like a streak of blood. 

The light was still too bright for his eyes. Part of him wanted to stay defiantly near the surface, maybe on the steps, waiting to see what reaction would come, but he retreated down to his nest to tend his kelp and mind his snails and his urchins and his fish and his mussels. His crinkle bag escaped its home and floated to the surface, casting a tiny shadow on the bottom of the pool that haunted him. He desperately wanted to eat whatever was inside it. He desperately wanted the gnawing thing inside him that desperately wanted to eat _everything_ to go away. 

That evening he heard the noises of someone in the water. He was hidden in the kelp patch, which in just a few days had already visibly expanded. There were holdfasts clinging to his egg chair, and to some of the other objects he’d dragged closer for the purpose, even the fake plants. Eventually, probably, the entire pool would be covered in kelp. 

He’d expected the same person he’d seen before, the one who’d been upset. Queen Luxia had said their names in the message, gently, as if she could give the memories of them back to him. The gold one was Hunk, and they had been together at the palace for a time. The green one was Pidge. Keith. Shiro. Princess Allura of Altea. Coran of Altea. 

But the silhouette at the top of the water was small and compact, wearing a wetsuit with a green and white snorkel. The Green Paladin, he presumed; color-coded for the convenience of amnesiacs. Her name was Pidge.

She was swimming out determinedly towards the dark, floating strands of kelp, grabbing onto them as she came near and popping out the mouth of her snorkeling tube.

“You’re an asshole, Lance!” she yelled over the top of the water, and she must have activated some kind of speakers set all around the pool because her voice broadcast clearly where he was, sulking next to his nest on the bottom, looking up at her fragile, vulnerable, awkward bipedal body, knowing she couldn’t catch him or even see him in the shadows of the kelp. 

Of course, she could probably turn on all the lights. Maybe she would be the one to suggest draining the pool.

“Hunk’s really worried about you, and you won’t even come out to talk to us! What the hell is wrong with you? You listened to the message, I know you know the Queen was telling the truth, you’re almost past the withdrawal stage and all the lingering effects of the crap you were being fed, so you don’t have any reason not to be thinking clearly! You need to eat, not swirl your food around the stupid pool or throw it at the walls. You can’t just hide at the bottom forever. Did you forget we’re in the middle of fighting a war against the Galra? Remember them? Evil empire, taking over the universe?”

Yes, he’d forgotten. He’d unlearned the word ‘Galra,’ he’d unlearned the word ‘Voltron.’ He’d been a sheltered, pampered member of a harem, a kept boy, hidden away in luxury and safety like one of the Queen’s prize jewels. It was ridiculous to think of himself in combat. He’d motivated his mer-cat-- his lion-- to defend the safety of the village by fervent _prayer._

“We need you back,” Pidge was saying. She was furious with him, the water sluicing across her skin carrying the taste of her anger. “We can’t form Voltron without you, and Allura says that she’s afraid your connection with the Blue Lion is getting weaker. You need to figure out how to be a paladin again. I don’t care if you have a tail, I’ll make you a fishtank to strap into Blue’s cockpit, you need to get up here and stop-- doing whatever it is you’re doing. What even are you doing? I know you can hear me.”

She plunged her masked face back into the water, looking for him among the kelp strands. Lance remained still on the bottom, letting the flow of the kelp cloak hide him. It was too dark for her to see him.

“Fine.” Now she sounded bitter. “Eat snails and kelp, see if I care. You’re going to make yourself sick and then we’re going to fish your unconscious ass out with a big guppy net and put you back in the infirmary for another week. Better yet, I’ll drain this whole pool and only refill it up to four feet.”

He knew it. He watched her paddle back to the shallows, her tiny, flipperless legs kicking wildly, creating turbulence and streams of bubbles. It was like watching a wounded fish flail helplessly. Her feet found the bottom and she stood up, rising out of the water, suddenly becoming a disembodied pair of limbs instead of a silhouette. He watched her ascend the steps. She left the tray of food where it was and pulled off her mask and scooped up a towel, scrubbing angrily at her wet hair.

“There’s more messages on the recorder, by the way, and you’d better bring that one on the bottom of the pool back to me. They’re waterproof but that doesn’t mean you get to sink all of them.” 

The speakers crackled and then went silent. She’d left the room. 

How dare she yell at him, he thought, his spines stiffening and extending in indignation now that she was gone. As if this was his fault. As if he’d chosen this. If they wanted him to eat, they should know better than to bring him difficult human food, and if they wanted to come speak to him they should know better than to stand on solid ground and yell, with all their weapons and advantages and incomprehensible motives, and expect him to come meek and submissive to them. What reason had they given him to trust their word? The message on the recorder device had sounded like Queen Luxia’s voice, but how could he tell for certain without the strength of her aura, the intangible power that was her authority as a Queen mermaid? When a Queen spoke, her word was law. The air-breathers had no authority over him except as captors, strangers, claiming to be his friends and comrades. 

Despite all that, he didn’t believe they were lying to him wholesale. The story of the Baku Garden was horrifying but held true against the disappearances, and he remembered the heavy, foggy feeling of comfort and assurance that came half from the Queen and half from the food they had eaten. If the Baku Garden could control a Queen, it could then easily control an entire mermaid population. And he had heard the roaring of a monstrous creature in the last moments of that battle, and seen flashes of images through the eyes of his mer-cat. There had been a beast, and the air-breathers had fought to defeat it.

That didn’t make it any easier to swallow his captivity now. They said he had been sick, they said he had been unconscious and they’d cared for him. He didn’t remember that, he only knew that he felt sore and aching and ill afterwards. 

The Altean recording device sitting on the bottom of the pool irritated him. He wanted to ignore it, but there were small lights on it that flashed regularly, capturing his attention. Lance wrestled with himself and then reluctantly swam over to it, scooping it up and bringing it back to his nest. He didn’t particularly want to listen to any more messages, even from Queen Luxia, but the human’s words would nag at him until he did. She would probably come back to yell again, he reasoned with himself. He might as well get it over with. 

But the message wasn’t from the Queen. It was his own voice emanating from the device, tinny and small, and he jerked in astonishment.

“Hey there, uh, me. Future-me. So we all got to talking and we thought we should, you know, take some precautions in case of emergency, so we’re all recording these audio journal things to try and make sense of everything that’s happened, I guess. And to remind us of who we are and what we’re doing. You know, because Shiro lost his memory and stuff, and what if one of us gets hit by some crazy space weapon and turns into a child and doesn’t remember any of what happened? It’s weird to think all the stuff with Voltron happened so quickly, you know, if we got our memories messed up or reset back to just the day before Shiro crashed, we’d be all the way back at the ‘holy shit, aliens exist’ stage and the ‘holy shit, Shiro’s alive’ stage. We’d definitely be back at the ‘holy shit, I’m a legendary space defender guy and I pilot a giant robot and live in a space castle’ stage, and that’s really far back, you know? I would literally only know Pidge and Hunk, everybody else would be a strange weirdo. Except Shiro. He’d be a stranger, but he wouldn’t be a weirdo. And the Princess, obviously, because she’d be a beautiful alien princess.”

“So! Here is the for Lance by Lance recap of Lance’s space adventures, for all of your memory loss needs. Uh, if you’re listening to this, you’d better be Lance, this is not for the entertainment of general audiences, _Pidge._ Also, press the button when prompted for visual aids, this thing’s got a little holo-projector so I took some pictures.”

The recording chattered on. Interested despite himself, he turned the device end over end, learning how to manipulate the interface, discovering a menu he could click through and color-coded symbols that seemed to be individual audio files. There were a lot of blue entries. A lot. The other files were green, yellow, red, purple, pink, and a lurid red-orange. 

His voice on the recording was speaking too quickly, degenerating into tangents. Rambling about something called Garrison, which sounded like a school or an academy, and students and teachers there, and how much he’d hated this or that class, and then suddenly breaking off to talk about his last time home, and simulator scores, and a diner with great fries, and how it wasn’t weird that he worried about his friends’ skincare routines. 

The words strung together like gibberish. It was his voice, but it didn’t feel like _him_ talking. That wasn’t how he spoke, and listening to a stranger talk about a strange life on a strange planet, trying to pick out the slightest hint of something familiar in the flood of chatter, just made him feel worse. 

He pressed the button for one of the other colored files, one of the green entries, and was surprised when it began to play without demanding a password or any other type of security. Pidge’s voice filled the small chamber of his nest, sounding much calmer as she launched into a series of detailed observations on Altean technology and Galra technology. It didn’t sound like a personal, private journal entry so much as a science presentation. 

He wondered if any of them had actually recorded roadmaps for memory loss. Your name is Lance. You’re a human from the planet called Earth. You have brown hair and two legs. You are a Paladin of Voltron.

Pidge’s recording played on as Lance tried as best he could to groom himself without proper brushes or sponges or scale-rasps. There wasn’t even any wild seagrass or sand he could roll in, no harem siblings with clever fingers to comb through his hair and braid in shells or strands of pearls. They’d been pampered in the harem with massages and long, luxuriously relaxing grooming sessions-- and he’d been trained in those same arts himself, he’d had the honor of personally tending to Queen Luxia and to those who had his company bestowed on them as a mark of royal favor. The burly guards always enjoyed the attentions of the harem, displaying their courting colors and inviting favorites to mate, if they so wished. There was no possibility of eggs between them, as the Queen had to bless any unions intended for reproduction, so it was a gift of pleasure only. Lance had been mated many times by members of the royal guard.

He wondered if the Altean princess had her own proper harem, or if she had forsaken luxuries when she’d gone to war. He wondered if the paladins had a communal nest where they rested and kept each other warm, or if they were like the warrior classes, aggressive and territorial, requiring their own separate spaces. He wondered what Queen Luxia had told them about _him._

Perhaps nothing at all. Perhaps they’d assumed that they knew him, that they didn’t need to know anything about the temporary life he’d been living. Perhaps they didn’t care to know. 

The audio file was now deep in a technical discussion of Altean and Galra interfaces, with Pidge posing and answering questions in silly voices, mimicking a group of students haranguing a teacher. She had a much nicer speaking voice when it wasn’t sharp with anger. 

Were they friends, he wondered, that she would yell at him out of familiarity? Were they not friends at all but merely comrades in arms, that she would yell out of real irritation? He remembered her in the palace, impatient, violent. Had she wanted to rescue him at all?

She’d said they needed him to form Voltron, to fight their enemies. They needed his mer-cat. 

Lance rubbed at his scales with a handful of rough edged kelp fronds as he listened, trying to ignore the gnawing edge of hunger in his belly. He felt exhausted but too anxious to sleep, coiling and recoiling his tail reflexively like a fretful guppy. The rough patches on his skin frustrated and upset him, the ragged edges of his fins an irritation every time he saw them out of the corner of his eye. He even yanked out some of his scales, finding fault in their color and texture. There was no one to tell him to stop. His fingers itched for the sharp shard of stone he used to pry the urchins open, wanting to scrape it down his tail and send a shimmering waterfall of scales cascading to the blank white bottom. 

Instead he curled himself into the egg chair and groped for the audio device, dragging it close to halt Pidge’s recording mid-word, flicking buttons to send the selection cursor randomly through the other files and letting it fall where it would. He pressed play without looking, listening to the first few spoken lines before moving on to the next recording. 

The different voices hit his ears like a barrage. Strangers chattering, greeting their future-selves, reciting log dates in bored monotones, talking about their lives with the kind of unconscious shorthand that made it impossible to follow their leaps and bounds of subject matter. His own voice, alien and a little horrifying, talking brightly and blithely about incomprehensible things, utterly assured that his future self listening in would understand everything perfectly. He cringed away, uncomfortable, and hit the button to switch. One of the entries even began with a burst of loud singing in an alien language; he cut that entry immediately and sent the cursor spinning off to the next file in a desperate search for something that didn’t wound his ears.

Unlike the others, this file started out with utter silence. The faint, far sounds of the pool room came in clearly under the sudden absence of speech. 

Lance glanced down at the tiny lights on the device, wondering if he’d accidentally paused it, but his sharp ears picked up the noises of someone breathing on the recording. Hesitating, perhaps. Maybe wondering how to begin. None of the others had seemed hesitant to talk about themselves, or at least how stupid they found the idea of talking to themselves.

And then a male voice began to speak, quiet and low and steady: “Your name is Takashi Shirogane. You’re twenty-four years old. You lost your right arm some time in the last six months. You’re safe here.”

The words could have been a mantra. Lance uncurled himself from his protective huddle, ever so slightly. 

The voice went on, sometimes steadily, sometimes leaving awkward pauses between the words like the speaker was struggling to voice them. Explaining. Dissecting, even, like someone who really was worried that they would have to use this as a roadmap for lost memories. The voice-- Takashi Shirogane, but your friends will call you Shiro-- talked himself patiently through the circumstances of leaving Earth, discovering the Altean castle, discovering Voltron. Lance listened in fascination.

Shiro spoke quietly about the war, about the lions, about his companions, about his prosthetic arm, laying out details one after another. Lance had the impression of someone sitting in their room during the darkest hours of the night, alone and unsleeping, giving voice to all the rushing, semi-coherent fears running through their head. 

It’s okay if you can’t sleep, Shiro was saying on the recording, his voice infinitely gentle. It’s okay if you get shaky, if the room seems too small or too big, and the lights are too bright. It’s okay if you can’t remember who you are when you first wake up. It’ll come back. It’ll be okay. Drink the water in the container on the bedside table, if you’re in your room. Take the medication if you feel like you can stand it. There are timers on your watch. Remember to eat. Remember to stop working out after two hours and do something else. Don’t go into the training arena by yourself without a spotter. Don’t go into the labs by yourself. Don’t go walking in the dark.

Remember where you are. Remember who you are. You’re not alone.

The pitch of the silence in Lance’s ears changed as the recording came to an end. The menu lights blinked softly in the close darkness, and then the device automatically clicked over into the next entry. 

It began the same way. Shiro, speaking quietly into the recording with the same four sentence introduction with the same cadence, same tone. Lance drew his finger over the menu and slid the selection to a random entry in the purple category; he was unsurprised to hear it start the same way. 

“Your name is Takashi Shirogane. You’re twenty-four years old. You lost your right arm some time in the last six months. You’re safe here.” 

Lance listened to entry after entry, long into the night, head pillowed on the curve of his arm and the device resting on his open palm. He could almost pretend that he was back in the harem, protected and nestled among his siblings, listening drowsily as they whispered quietly to each other nearby, soft under the rush of water through his gills. Shiro wasn’t whispering on the recording, but he was quiet, subdued, calm even when he was talking about uncomfortable or frankly terrifying things. 

It felt a little invasive, actually, but no one had told Lance to keep out of any particular entries or types of entries. No one had told him anything at all. He scooped up the recording device with both hands and held it close to his chest, curling around it as he let the words wash over him.

You’re safe here. It’s okay. It will be okay. 

*


	3. Chapter 3

***

In the morning, there was something in the water with him.

The noises jolted him awake: splashing, voices underwater, but it was also the strange feeling that hummed through the water like a faint current of energy. His skin shivered eagerly; it was the same electric feeling he used to get from his mistress when she exerted her power, the kind that left enemies cowering before her and subordinates shuddering in a near-ecstasy of submission. Lance couldn’t help a certain tight achiness around his breeding slit, muscles quivering in remembrance of previous matings. Sometimes the Queen merely wanted to see her thralls unsheathe themselves before her, sex organs writhing helplessly, untouched, all of them trembling and awaiting her command. 

Poking his head out of his makeshift cave and the curtain of woven kelp, he caught sight of a long, sinuous, familiar shadow stretched on the pool bottom. A mermaid tail. He made some kind of humiliating noise and spilled himself out of bed, clumsily thrashing his way free of his nest without thought and darting into the kelp strands, brushing the clinging fronds hurriedly out of his way. He burst out into the open water of the pool with fins flared, streams of bubbles rising around him.

The mermaid was right there, her silver hair a blossoming cloud above her as she pivoted to face him, her blue eyes wide and startled. She was beautiful like all mermaids were beautiful, with broad, muscular shoulders and a sleek, powerful tail; skin darker than his own, changing at her hips into the most lovely opalescent scales he’d ever seen. Her fins shaded into sunset colors, pink and red and then a delicate blue. The filmy white fabric draped across her torso had floated up to bare her full, high breasts, and she was curiously without jewelry save for the flashing gold rings threaded through her dark nipples. Despite the lack of ornaments to declare her rank she was obviously a Queen, stronger even than Luxia, undeniably the source of the power that throbbed through the water.

This close to her Lance could barely think underneath the onslaught of her presence, like an overwhelming heartbeat drowning out his natural rhythms. It felt good. It felt perfect, something he’d been missing, and he didn’t flinch at all when she reached out and touched his face. Her fingertips, unclawed and strange, brushed across his lips. He wanted to kiss them, but he had not been given permission. 

“Come to the surface with me,” she commanded in a voice like bells, the harmonics of it strange in the water, and he nodded dumbly, beating his tail weakly to follow her. He felt dizzy and disoriented, the light from the surface blinding him as he rose too quickly for his eyes to adjust. 

The humid air was a shock to his lungs as his head broke the surface and he dragged in a huge, shaky breath, treading water. Part of him half-expected to find the air-breathers there waiting for him, lining the edges of the pool with their weapons and displeased expressions, but instead there was a miraculous sight: the entire room was blue-hued and shimmering, sunlight reflecting in shallow water. The transparent, glass-like material that arched overhead had stood between this room and the cold airless stars; now it separated him from an ocean. Strange fish darted past and shadows of plants waved rhythmically in an invisible tide. The castle ship had made planetfall while he slept and submerged itself, plunging Lance’s prison underwater.

The blue mer-cat was waiting for him just beyond the transparent barrier.

He felt the gravity change around him and understood immediately; ribbons of water from the surface of his pool were eeling and spooling upwards, floating free in wavering silver orbs, and there was a sphere-shaped break in the barrier where water lapped and beckoned. An opening to the outside ocean, floating above him. 

Or rather, below him. His aquarium had been anchored to a ceiling by gravity manipulation, and the mer-cat was actually swimming below him and his room, separated from him by a moon pool. 

He didn’t wait for permission. He could smell the ocean, a real ocean, waiting for him in that little circle of water, and a flip of his tail sent him down to the bottom of the pool for as much distance and momentum as he could muster. He rocketed towards the surface and leapt high, somersaulting, and felt the pull of true gravity catch him as he cleared his own body length above the water. Then he was falling, diving, and he made himself a streamlined arrow slicing into the aquamarine waters of the moon pool. 

It was not his ocean. He knew that at the first deep breath, the first taste of the water rushing over his gills. It was warm and tropical and foreign, the tang of it strange but invigorating. The fish that curiously investigated the immense metal hull of the castle ship were unknown to him, and strange plants grew on the sandy, wave-swept bottom. None of it mattered; after the recycled water in his pool it was all wonderful, it looked and tasted and smelled wonderful, and his mer-cat was lowering its great steel head to him, its gold eyes bright and shining, and Lance swam to it joyfully, forgetting for a moment that he was hungry and weak and bedraggled, and draped himself across its muzzle. That faint place in the back of his mind where the mer-cat’s alien consciousness slept felt warm and fizzy, pleased, as if greeting an old friend who had been away for years. 

The mer-cat crooned to him, its deep brass voice echoing through the water like whalesong. Lance trilled back, his fins and spines rippling at full extension, displaying himself like a prospective mate despite the lack of his jewelry and finery. He could tell the mer-cat didn’t mind his ragged appearance. It was purring for him. It had missed him. It opened its great jaws and tilted its head sideways to capture him inside its mouth like a protective mother alligator, scooping him up. Lance let it, stroking the roof of its mouth. His tail dangled out of the gaps between its fangs like an unlucky dinner morsel, but he knew himself as safe inside the cage of teeth as he would’ve been in the arms of his Queen. The steel above and below him was warm to the touch, as warm as a living creature. 

The mer-cat tossed its head playfully and Lance clung to one of its canines in delight, water rushing past him. He let go at the apex of the arc, somersaulting giddily amidst clouds of bubbles up above the great blue and silver head. The weakness he’d felt earlier seemed distant now, as if the mer-cat’s presence was able to bolster his flagging energy, enough to make up for his fatigue and his empty stomach. 

Not far off in the distance he could see the sandy seafloor rising to become tropical shoreline, corals flowering on rocky outcroppings and fields of shallow water seagrass waving gently in the tide. There were noises echoing through the water, marine creatures hunting and playing and calling to each other in squeaks and clicks and long, sustained musical trills. The surf seemed full of life. 

The Altean ship lounged just past the drop off like an immense sunbather, resting on the sandy plain. It was bigger than he imagined, although he’d assumed it had to be huge just from the size of the pool chamber with its immense vaulted ceiling; big enough to house dozens of mer-cats. Its gleaming white body was half in and half out of the water, attracting curious sea life to investigate its curves and angles. 

Tilting his head back, he could see the sky above the waves was a brilliant, unrelenting blue. A paradise planet, perhaps, far removed from the thick pack ice that covered the surface of Queen Luxia’s territory. 

The mer-cat swam forward to him and he to it, letting it take his weight, curling himself around the smooth planes of its nose. There was a long, shallow scratch running down the length of its muzzle, dark gray and unsightly against its sapphire skin. He spread his fingers over it. 

“Were you hurt, fighting that thing?” he asked softly. There didn’t seem to be any debilitating damage from the battle with the creature masquerading as the Baku Garden, and the mer-cat was swimming well, but he would still need to make a thorough inspection. His duties as the mer-cat’s bride included channeling and focusing quintessence the way Queen Luxia had taught him, gathering it to his hands to heal injuries. Quintessence manipulation allowed him to sense abnormal energy patterns, to summon and control creatures like the great rays and the seahorses, and the Queen had said he was strongly gifted for one so young. He had been able to feel the force of her power even during his fever, when he’d been half-lucid and terrified of his nightmares, clinging to her weakly while she sang him lullabies and wrapped her tail around his own to keep him warm. Queen Luxia had healed him with her own hands, bringing him food and medicine from the Baku Garden, sheltering him in the curve of her personal sleeping nest, telling him stories of the palace and the harem and the pod that he’d missed out on while he’d been sick. Things that everyone else knew that had seemed strange and foreign to him, memories that the fever had blurred. 

He realized, abruptly, that of course there had never been a fever. Not a natural one, anyway. If he’d been ill from anything it would’ve been from the aftermath of the transformation process that had taken his legs and given him gills. He didn’t remember it. He didn’t remember anything before waking up in the Queen’s bower, dizzy and confused and barely cognizant of his own name, and she had been there waiting for him with soothing words and touches, conditioning him to her hands. Gentling him like a wild animal. She’d told him a tale of being ill with a wasting fever that affected his memories, that he’d been an ordinary denizen of the palace until the mer-cat’s arrival had brought him out of his illness, and he’d believed her. She had given him drugged food from the Baku Garden and told him stories of life in the palace to replace memories he’d never had. Her attendants had cared for him, massaging his aching muscles and treating his tender, soft scales, newly grown like a guppy’s. He had believed every word they’d said about his condition, and never once thought of himself as a captive.

And he had even seen the room where the transformation had taken place, because one of his duties as the mer-cat’s bride and member of the harem was to attend the Queen when she went to commune with the mother of oceans. Deep in the bowels of the palace was a cavernous room where ancient fortresses of corals grew up around hydrothermal vents, spewing their translucent, hazy plumes of steam and heat and chemicals into the chamber. Brilliant scarlet and white ventworms thronged around them, some longer than Lance’s arm, feeding on the flow of minerals, and glowing quintessence welled up from the cracks in the chamber’s floor and seeped from the vent mouths like magma, heavier than the surrounding water, flowing slowly into pools and patterns that had been carved into the floor. The spirals and circles were supposed to be a map not just of the planet but of the solar system, with deeper pools representing celestial bodies. The representation of the mother of oceans was a spiral of glittering, quintessence-soaked black pearls set into niches in the wall, encompassing the entire room to demonstrate the breadth of her power. A sculpture of the moon goddess had been painstakingly carved from a massive hanging stalactite, her cupped hands holding a small mountain of shining white pearls. 

Many of the vents were carved into statues of legendary mermaid Queens, wearing crowns and armor of cultivated coral, with long elaborately braided chains of pearls and beads draped around their bodies. Their hands held tridents and jewelled knives and silver braided nets, their mouths open to emit the billowing fumes of the vents, and colonies of anemones and waving corals and ventworms were encouraged to grow as their hair, floating freely in the currents inside the cavern. Other statues held conches and abalone shells aloft like ewers for oil or water, thin streams of shining quintessence poured from shell to shell. 

Queen Luxia went to the chamber for inspiration and guidance from the mothers, both mortal and celestial, to breathe the breath of the planet and to interpret the patterns of quintessence. She required attendants to sing the songs of resonance for her, and to hand her the proper gems and tools for her work, and she required them to polish and scrub the statues and clear the vents in the ceiling of blockages and tend the sculpted coral. Only trained, trusted attendants could be asked to do so, as the chamber was only accessible through deep, winding tunnels full of giant anemones, and great eels colonized the latticeworks of coral. These guardians would bow and give way before anyone with a sufficiently powerful aura, but careless attendants and those who could not master their fears were still regularly stung or bitten. 

Lance remember being led carefully through the parted tentacles of the anemones once he was well enough to leave the bower, sheltered by the Queen’s presence, watching long, dark shapes with staring eyes wind through the holes in the floor and walls, and the stinging tentacles reached with blind hunger into the space he’d just vacated as he followed his mistress. He had never had a problem marshalling enough quintessence to keep the predators at bay, but the other attendants clutched at his arms when they swam together through the tunnels, hovering so close they fouled each other’s fins. The eels preferred to be pacified with bits of fish and offal, and would swim along beneath them like hungry shadows. Their proximity to the vents and the flowing quintessence seemed to have affected them, as they were smarter than their open-water cousins, and larger, and sported strange colors and mutations. Several enterprising females even made reputations for themselves as gatekeepers when they were spawning, demanding extravagant gifts of food or a carnal embrace with a willing partner before they would let any of the attendants pass. Their eggs wouldn’t be fertilized inside a mermaid’s belly, of course, but the eels didn’t seem to mind, and left dozens of hapless attendants dazed with pleasure and stuffed full, forcing them to go about their work in the caverns with swollen bellies until they could find a few minutes of privacy to expel the soft, spongy eggs. 

The eels were not the only creatures affected by the presence of quintessence. Growing In the midst of the forest of smoking vents and coral-crowned statues was a giant blue-tipped clam, enthroned in rock and as ancient as the cave itself. Its armored shell was thick and knotted, large enough that two mermaids could have laid down across its length, head to tail, and still found themselves with extra space. The clam was so infused with quintessence that it was barely even a clam anymore, sprouting transparent antennae that protruded from its parted mouth and waved in the chemical rich water. A clear, jelly-like substance bulged and subsided rhythmically from the gaps in its shell like it was breathing. The clam was a living well of quintessence. The Queen’s blessing, necessary for a mating to bring about offspring, required the egg-bearer to swallow a tiny seed pearl that had been incubated inside the ancient clam and infused with quintessence in order to become fertile. As a member of the harem Lance had worn a necklace of them, tempted by their presence but trusted not to abuse them, expected to obediently wait for his mistress’s command, and he had been told that the Queen could work miracles not just through the pearls but by using the clam itself to reshape flesh and bone. Fatally injured mermaids had been offered to the clam’s searching tendrils and pulled inside, worked upon by its internal mechanisms like an offending grain of sand, and were there slowly transformed. 

Luxia had called him her lovely pearl. He shivered, his fingers groping at his throat for the necklace that was no longer there. 

The mer-cat nudged him gently, pulling him from his thoughts. It was not concerned for its own shallow injuries. The mer-cat was strong, and healing well, and concerned that he was not. It nosed at him, purring loudly enough for him to feel the vibration all the way down to his bones, and pushed a flurry of images and sensations at him; teeth chewing, full-belly-feeling. Safety and protection. It could feel the ache of hunger in him and his uncertain fears. 

“I didn’t want air-breather food,” he protested guiltily, feeling the weight of the mer-cat’s worry. “I don’t want anything from them.”

 _Pack,_ the mer-cat sent, invoking feelings of safety, togetherness, but Lance shook his head, his throat tightening with the urge to keen. Those things were in the harem for him, in the arms of his brothers and sisters and the time he’d spent at Queen Luxia’s side, not in the sterile waters of his prison aboard an air-breather ship. He tried to send back images and feelings of his own-- the Green Paladin’s anger, the dissonant strangeness of the voices he’d listened to on the recordings, including his own. 

_Pack,_ the mer-cat insisted. It nudged him again, moving him through the water, and Lance clung tightly to its muzzle as it showed him images of all five mer-cats harrying the Baku beast, working together like a pod of hunting orcas. The others were clumsy and slow in the water, out of their element, and the blue mer-cat had been distracted by his distress, torn between fighting the battle with its brethren and trying to seek him in the palace. Lance didn’t know how much the mer-cat understood of what had happened to him, as it had been sluggish and quiet during his time in the harem-- perhaps reflecting his own drugged state. Lance’s duties to the mer-cat had been laid out by Queen Luxia, and she, of course, under the influence of the Garden, had not told him that he was meant to ride it into battle the way the warrior classes rode their seahorse mounts or the giant rays. The bride of a mer-cat was to remain hidden away in safety, she’d said, and his prayers would motivate the guardian to move in times of emergency. The mer-cat had spent most of its time inanimate, resting. When he could manage to touch its mind through meditation, he had the impression of weariness after a great battle, and his first lessons of quintessence manipulation had been to heal dozens upon dozens of punctures and scrapes and burn marks across the gleaming steel skin. Queen Luxia said the mer-cat had come to them this way, drifting down injured and half-asleep to their kingdom from some far away battle, and that it had settled like a statue on the sea floor in the valley nearby. Lance’s first great triumph as the guardian’s bride had been cajoling it to lift its head slightly, disturbing layers of silt and sediment that had fallen on it like snow. 

It was awake now, though, as though all it had needed was a good fight to remind itself that it wasn’t a statue. It could move again, and travel through the stars if it wished. Lance rested his forehead against the mer-cat’s nose and selfishly, foolishly, thought of _going home,_ picturing the glittering lights of the underwater valley and the delicate spires of the palace. The gates, and the great hall, and his chambers in the harem, his small treasure trove of personal items in their places on the wall ledges and the empty shells that served as containers. They were all underwater things, jewelry and combs and baubles he’d collected or had been gifted, and his corals, and the little glowing jewelfish that lived in them. He thought of his nest, warm and comfortable, and of the familiar sounds of the harem at night, and the beautiful sculpted hallways that led the way to the Queen’s bower. 

The mer-cat only purred at him, rumbling in the water. Its thoughts of home were flashes of stars and galaxies, the interior of the Altean ship, the company of its brethren, and images of a figure in blue and white, armed and armored. The Blue Paladin. A fighter. A warrior, like the paladins that had invaded the palace and fought their way past the guards, terrifying with their magic weapons. The cave-dwellers had shown them the way, yes, must have led them to the right passages and the right places to avoid confrontations, but to those who dwelt in the inner sanctums of the palace it had seemed like the air-breathers must have invaded by the front gate and defeated every single guard in an unstoppable, inexorable march. 

“That’s not me,” he whispered, even as he became acutely aware of the weight of the paladin weapon at his side, hanging from his braided kelp belt like it belonged there. It felt so natural to wear it he’d forgotten about it. “I’m not a soldier, or a warrior. I lived in the harem. I served the Queen.”

 _Queen,_ the mer-cat echoed, and nudged him sharply, turning him in the water. 

The silver haired mermaid was approaching. Lance had been distracted from it by the mer-cat, but now he could feel the throb of power in the water again, pulsing like a heartbeat. He froze, staring at her wide-eyed, caught between the urge to flee from a stranger and the urge to school together with another of his kind for safety.

“Lance,” she called, and again her voice rang through him like a struck bell; he drifted away from the safety of the mer-cat and towards her, pulled by the sheer gravity of her aura. She was stronger than any mermaid he’d ever felt, and all his nervous instincts whispered that she would protect and shelter him, claim him, accept him into her harem. A Queen would take care of him.

If he pleased her. He had never had to do this, display himself for the inspection and approval of a new, unknown matriarch, but he had heard the terrible stories whispered in the dark of the harem. Queens that were aggressive and dominating, Queens that would kill for small offenses. Thralls banished for their transgressions, exiled to waste away alone unless their beauty or charm or skills could win them a place in a new pod with a new Queen. Exiles traveled thousands of miles to find new pods that would not clash with the territory of their former Queens, singing their lonely songs in the deep. Some were never answered. Some became wild and strange, preferring isolation and the violence of a solitary life in dangerous waters like feral beasts. Some never recovered from their first rejection, and even after being accepted by a new Queen were shadows of their former selves, unsinging.

The silver Queen did not give him a chance to display himself, however. A single flick of her tail closed the distance between them and she took his face between her hands, casually possessive, the ends of her hair and the fabric of her garment sliding like silk over his bare skin. The wash of her power stole his breath, his gills fluttering uselessly. Her eyes were the color of crystals and sea ice, impossibly beautiful, and he knew himself to be helplessly in love with her even before that funny little lurch came from deep in his belly, the entrance to his womb swelling and expanding in expectation. If she wrapped her tail firmly around his and unhinged her jaw to bite deeply into his shoulder, holding him still, he would willingly, joyfully accept the flood of her eggs into his belly. Her children would be beautiful, he thought dreamily. Silver haired and dark skinned and lovely, perhaps with his blue scales. And he wouldn’t lose a single egg, he would warm them and nurture them and keep them safe until they were ready to be laid, he would never disappoint her... 

The Queen spoke his name again, and he struggled to focus on her words, pulling himself back from the tide of instinct her touch stirred. 

“I was told you haven’t been eating,” she was saying to him, searching his face with frightening intensity. Her fingers were warm along his jaw, and strong, with calluses from weaponswork, and he leaned into her touch helplessly. In the harem he had been in constant contact with his brothers and sisters, coiling their tails together affectionately, draping their arms around each other, admiring and grooming each other, smoothing silken fins and playing with jewelry. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been left so isolated and untouched. In the harem, he was never alone. 

She pressed her palm to his forehead as if checking for fever, the way Queen Luxia had, and all he wanted was to let himself slide forward into her arms, press himself against her in supplication. He wanted to be touched. He was apprehensive about his kidnappers, but he was so, so tired of being alone.

“Your temperature is a bit cool,” she was saying, her hands finding his shoulders. “Are you still feeling unwell?”

She spoke as though she knew him, although he couldn’t remember her. She must, he thought, be the Queen of the air-breathers somehow, and the Queen of the castle-ship. He couldn’t believe himself, that he had forgotten such a powerful, beautiful creature. He didn’t even know her name.

“Lance?”

He blinked, realizing she had asked him a direct question. “I… didn’t feel good, earlier,” he managed, tongue-tied and fumbling. “I wasn’t hungry.”

She released him then, regretfully, floating back a few inches, her beautiful silver hair swirling above her like a burgeoning thundercloud. The markings on her cheeks glittered and glimmered, catching the eye like light reflecting off of fine pearls. The heartbeat of her power pulled at him, squeezing his lungs, making it difficult to breathe until he conformed to her rhythm. She was so, so strong. A Queen so powerful should have been the ruler of multiple pods, a grand matriarch over several daughters leading their pods. 

She was strong enough to be the mistress of the mer-cats. He could feel the way the blue mer-cat gave way to her, floating above them like a silent witness and thoroughly ignoring Lance’s own anxieties. The blue mer-cat would not save him from this Queen if he needed saving. The blue mer-cat belonged to her, and he belonged to the mer-cat. 

“I know you have been feeling poorly,” she said gently, and the softness in her words was like a balm to his nerves, forgiving and soothing. “But you are frightening the others. You must eat, Lance. You must recover your strength as quickly as possible. We cannot form Voltron without the Blue Lion, and she will not fly without her pilot.”

The chastisement was gentle, but he flinched anyway, dropping his gaze from hers, his fins and spines slicking down with unhappiness. The other paladins were the creatures that had invaded his home and torn him from the life he’d known. He wasn’t sure he could care about their distress, and he certainly couldn’t think of himself as one of them, wearing that armor and wielding weapons in battle. 

And the mer-cat _had_ flown without him. It had participated in the battle against the Baku Garden monster while he’d been hiding in the palace, and while he’d been drugged and unconscious. His only lucid moments after being caught in the nets were images of the battle, borrowed from his mer-cat’s mind; for those brief moments it had been _his_ rending claws and powerful muscles, his agile body weaving through the water, his weapons firing, his voice roaring a challenge. He had felt his brethren around him, slower and out of their elements in the icy water, but trying their best, carrying their tiny, fragile, mortal captains inside themselves like precious beating hearts. 

It had been a long and difficult battle, even with the five of them. The mer-cat had moved at his command from a distance, but not, perhaps, in the way it was meant to, and moreover he could not argue with a Queen. Perhaps she was correct, and the mer-cat would not launch into space without him. Perhaps it needed its captain aboard to transform into the Voltron weapon properly.

“I’m sorry,” he said, helplessly, not knowing how else to respond. He had disappointed the Queen already. He could not fake being a warrior, a Voltron paladin, or feign eagerness for battle. “I’m. I will try to eat.” 

“I’m glad to hear that.” She was still watching him closely, as if inspecting him. He was ashamed all over again at what must have been his ragged, pathetic appearance; ripped, ragged fins, unkempt skin and scales, bruises blooming along the length of his arms from the needlemarks, his lack of jewelry and cosmetics. The one injury he’d managed to heal on his own with quintessence was a long scrape that ran down from his shoulder, deep enough to have torn his scales off, and it pulled every time he tried to use his arm. Back in the harem there were medicines and balms he would’ve used to keep such a wound from scarring, wrapping it up in a thick bandage of kelp leaves until the tender new scales started to grow back, but here he’d been forced to try and use his own feeble powers, making himself dizzy and ill each time. It had taken him three tries to heal it, and he’d been half-fainting by the end of each attempt. The mer-cat was actually easier to heal and always had been; there was a strong current of quintessence flowing inside of it, somehow, and Lance had only ever needed to reach out and coax it in a certain direction, channeling it towards the scrapes and gouges. The mer-cat could have healed itself, he presumed, but it did not usually stop to think about injuries unless reminded by its captain. Many of the warriors and their mounts were the same way, fierce in battle and unmindful of any wounds until an attendant scolded them into paying attention. 

“Lance, can you tell me what happened to you? At the palace,” she clarified at his confused look. 

Surely she had already heard everything from Queen Luxia, and from the paladin that the cave-dwellers had swarmed around, who claimed to have fallen into the ocean along with Lance and his mer-cat at the beginning of everything. Lance’s own memory was patchy, full of holes. He did not have a complete timeline to offer, even of the ‘rescue,’ as he was not sure what had really happened and what had been his own fever dreams, struggling against the sedatives he’d been given during his capture. 

But powerful Queens could be distrustful of each other, and territorial about their thralls. He floated, hesitating, the currents of this strange ocean whispering along his scales, trying to think of what he should say. “I remember living at the palace,” he said uncertainly. “I lived in the… with the Queen’s attendants, her handmaidens, and her favorites. We all served her.”

“Do you remember how you arrived?”

He shook his head. “I woke up from a fever. She told me that I had been ill, that she and her attendants had been taking care of me.”

No. More than that. He remembered in sudden, sharp clarity: the warmth of Queen Luxia’s body curled around him, her webbed fingers combing softly through his hair as he hid his face against her, trembling. Keening, the sound muffled against her. Mermaids did not cry.

“Lance?”

The words came out like a confession, soft, aching, a wound that was still raw. He’d put it out of his mind deliberately, clinging to that mantra-- they were all safe and warm. Wanted. 

“She said I had been abandoned.” His tail twisted into anxious knots, coiling and uncoiling. “She said my pod-- my family must have left me, and that she would take me in.”

“She told you that? And you believed her?”

He drew back at the note of sharpness in the Queen’s voice, although it was not unexpected. It was an aspersion cast on the silver Queen, whether Luxia had intended it to be or not. Meekly, “I couldn’t remember. I thought it made sense, if I had been sick for a long time. I could barely swim on my own, and my scales had all sloughed off-- they were still growing back in, like a guppy’s, and she said it wasn’t safe to leave me alone when I was still so weak. She told me I was the chosen bride of the mer-cat, and that my role was to pray for it to defend the kingdom from harm.” 

“She,” the Queen corrected quietly. “She, not it. All of the lions are female.” Her mouth twisted, just faintly. “Only one of the paladins figured that out without having to be told. The one who had been bonded the longest.” 

Lance didn’t understand what she meant by that, but the Blue Lion rumbled above them both, perhaps chiming in with agreement. The immense head lowered down to them and Lance stretched up his arms automatically to receive its-- _her_ nudging caresses, and then finally batting her away with his tail after she had shoved him one way and then another like an orca playing with a seal. She reared back, mock-offended, shaking her great head, her maw gaping open to expose gleaming steel teeth. The Blue Lion was built for battle, no matter how he felt about it. He had no choice, if he wanted to stay with her. The Blue Lion had chosen him for its captain, even if he didn’t remember it, and was continuing to acknowledge him as her captain, and the pilot of a Voltron lion was always a paladin of Voltron. He could not be one without the other. 

“She was worried for you,” the Queen said behind him, that strange note that he couldn’t identify still in her lovely voice. “A debilitating injury or illness or-- other things, can sometimes jeopardize a pilot’s link with their lion. We were all worried for you.”

He looked back at the Queen, not understanding. There was something she was not saying, it was there in the flow of her quintessence, something constrained and leashed. Upset, perhaps, something roiling below the surface. “I feel fine,” he offered timidly, desperate to answer whatever she was not saying and treading the edge of a lie, a killing offense for some matriarchs. “I will be fine. I will get better soon.”

“I hope so,” she said softly. “You are needed as the right arm of Voltron.” She paused, looking at him intently. “Shiro needs his right arm in battle.”

Shiro. That was the name that had been on the recording, the one with the long silences and the soft, quiet voice. The one who had laid out his experiences as if he truly expected to suffer a loss of memory, and would need to guide himself back to who he was. Lance wished, abruptly, that he had bothered to look through the image files that were on the device, he wanted to know what the owner of that voice looked like. He had seen the Green and Yellow Paladins, Pidge and Hunk, he knew the shape of their silhouettes through the wavering of the surface water, but he didn’t remember Shiro from the battle. There had been too much chaos, explosions of silver bubbles obscuring his vision, debris sifting down like snow from the battle raging outside. He had only the vague impression of Shiro’s lion from the link with the mer-cat, a feeling of steadiness and security and immense strength. 

“Yes,” he said, distracted, missing the way the Queen’s eyes narrowed abruptly. 

He did not miss the sudden burst of movement, the hand that gripped his shoulder like a vise and the impact of his back and shoulders against the rough scrape of a coral formation. The Queen pinned him there effortlessly, her fingers thickening into claws, her scales visibly spreading and hardening, becoming armor along the serpentine length her body. She had grown larger too, her tail longer and more shark-like, and he remembered too late what the recordings had said about the Altean princess, Allura, shapeshifter and war-wager, whose father had re-discovered the lion weapons of ancient history. She felt like no Queen mermaid Lance had ever encountered because she was no mermaid at all. 

He was too stunned to struggle, too weak to bite. His tail beat and thrashed feebly until hers wrapped around it like a strangling vine, stifling his efforts. Her claws dug unmercifully into his shoulder, and he could taste blood in the water.

Bubbles gushed from his mouth, the breath driven from his lungs. Allura loomed above him like an avenging goddess, beautiful and terrible. “The Red Paladin is the right arm of Voltron,” she said, not quite a hiss, “and the Blue Paladin has been bonded the longest to his lion, and knew her without having to be told what she was.”

Ice swept through his veins as he realized his misstep. “Please, A-Allura--!”

“No.” She shook her head, her hair a bright halo above her, and held him more firmly against the coral. “I don’t believe that you remember my name. I am not sure that you remember anything, or that you even _are_ Lance. You have been gone for five of your human months. You attacked Hunk, your best friend, and injured Pidge when she was trying to help you in the medical bay, and since your awakening you have not acted at all like our Lance. Illness and the addiction to the Baku Garden only explains so much.”

He stared at her, stricken. 

“I brought you outside to see if you would run, and to see the Blue Lion’s reaction to you.” Her voice was steady, but he could feel the agitated turbulence in her, quintessence fluctuating wildly. She was upset, very upset, believing that one of her thralls might still be missing, that he was an imposter or an infiltrator. She might be upset enough to maim or kill him in a fit of emotion. Both of his hands were wrapped around her muscled forearm, but it was like trying to pry loose the closed jaws of a shark. 

“I didn’t run,” he choked out. “The mer-cat-- the lion, she is _my_ lion, I belong with her, I wouldn’t leave.” 

The Blue Lion was still floating above them. Motionless, reserved. Waiting to see what would happen. He lifted one arm, trying to reach out to her, trying to call her in his mind, but could not muster the concentration, his thoughts scattering in panic. The Blue Lion wouldn’t go against her mistress, even for her captain. 

“Then tell me what really happened,” Allura demanded, forcing him to focus on her. “Hunk said the rebels told him that the Queen was conducting quintessence experiments, just like the Galra.”

He flinched at the word ‘experiments,’ and it was the wrong response. Quintessence surged in her, singing along her arm and down into her clawed fingers, and pain blossomed in his shoulder anew.

He reacted without thinking. He clapped a hand over hers, calling quintessence into his own fingertips with as much desperate strength as he could muster, a blue light springing up, more than he’d ever used for healing, more than he had ever summoned to use on a living creature, and the overload of energy burned even through her armored scales, causing her to yank back and away, their tails untangling. He sank down to the sandy bottom at the base of the coral, coiling in on himself defensively, knowing she would catch him if he tried to make a dash for freedom. She was bigger and stronger and far more powerful, and she could put him in thrall with a single look, she could paralyze his gills and his fins and let him drown. 

“I’m sorry!” he gasped, knowing it for the futile gesture it was. He had _attacked_ a Queen. She would kill him on the spot. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I’m so sorry--”

“Lance,” she interrupted in a terrible low voice, clutching her burned hand to her chest, “is a human boy, and is not able to manipulate quintessence. We saw you on the security footage in the pool. You used quintessence to make the kelp grow, to heal your arm. The Galra Druids are the only ones who use quintessence like that.”

He shook his head frantically, trembling. Queen Luxia used quintessence. _Allura_ had just used quintessence. “I’m not. I’m not. I served the Queen, she taught me, she wanted me to use it, I don’t know why.” 

“What did she do to Lance?” Allura demanded.

“I am Lance!” His spines flared wide, an aggression display, and he found himself baring his fangs at her, another unforgivable crime. “I’m Lance, I don’t remember things but I’m still Lance. I don’t know why she did this to me, I don’t know why she made me forget, I don’t know why she wanted the Blue Lion around if she was being controlled by the Baku Garden! I don’t know! She told me I had always been a mermaid, she said my family had abandoned me and that she would take me in and teach me to be useful!” He halted, chest heaving, gills working overtime. “Why did it take so long for you to find me, if I’m one of your precious paladins? Why didn’t you come get me? Why didn’t my best friend come get me?”

Now Allura looked upset, her lips parted as if surprised at his outburst. Something he had said must have struck a nerve, because he could feel the way her power fluctuated, her concentration wavering badly enough to let go of her physical form. She shrunk slightly, her armored scales disappearing back into deep brown skin, and the muscles in her tail writhed unnaturally. 

She did not have a chance to answer him. The Blue Lion broke her silence and roared out over their heads, startling both of them badly. A flick of her tail propelled her down towards the white sandy bottom, setting down a huge paw unsubtly between the two of them as she settled like a sphinx, huge and inscrutable. Flurries of sand flew up from the impact. Lance held up his hands to protect his face and gills, his second eyelids closing instinctively as he was engulfed in the cloud of sand grains and small, irritated crustaceans.

It was his chance to flee. To swim for the open ocean, to leave all of them behind-- his kidnappers, this furious Queen, the cage they’d kept him in. He was fast and agile, even with his weakness, he could hide somewhere, bind his wound to keep the trail of blood from giving him away. He could still escape. 

But the Blue Lion swung her great head to him as if sensing his thoughts, a whining croon shivering through the water; a sad, pathetic noise from such an immense creature. He couldn’t do anything but go to her, pushing his way through the cloud of silt and sand until he found her muzzle and clung, stroking her nose reassuringly, crooning back to her. 

No. He would not be able to leave her. 

The sand settled back down slowly. He shut his eyes and held onto his lion.

“I-- I don’t want to be the Blue Paladin, and have to fight in a war.” Lance’s voice trembled. He was dizzy now, exhaustion and lack of food catching up to him more than the injury to his shoulder. “I lived in the Queen’s harem. I _liked_ being in the Queen’s harem. We were all safe and warm.”

“No.” Allura’s voice was low and certain. “The citizens of Queen Luxia’s kingdom were being fed to the Baku Garden. They were being lied to. And you… I will not pretend to know how Lance felt about war, but I know that he was proud to be the Blue Paladin. He was proud to fight for those who couldn’t fight for themselves.”

She stood on the sandy bottom now, wearing what must have been her true form: legs like an air breather, muscled and slim, bare feet planted on the sand as though she weighed more than her appearance suggested. The gauzy white shift she wore drifted about her waist, barely covering the juncture of her thighs; it had survived her transformation earlier when she’d grown armored scales and increased her size. She had kept her gills to breathe underwater, but she had no scales or fins or webbing, just glowing markings like those on her cheeks, traveling the length of her body. Her burned hand was clenched into a fist. 

She was still heart-stoppingly beautiful. He could picture her in the armor that the other air-breathers wore. Leading them into battle. Perhaps she, like her lions, had been built for war. 

“If… if I am not your Lance, if I am-- a trick, an experiment,” he said haltingly, “the Blue Lion would know, wouldn’t she? Wouldn’t _you_ know if I am the real Blue Paladin?”

Allura’s hair drifted slowly around her bare shoulders like clouds, stirred by the tide. She looked like one of the goddess statues in the deep chambers, ancient and unforgiving. “A long time ago,” she said, “the mind of one of the Black Paladins was poisoned. Corrupted slowly. He betrayed his fellow paladins. He murdered my father, and still the Black Lion obeyed him until the end. The lions do not always recognize deceit.” 

Zarkon. She was speaking of Zarkon, the Black Emperor, the most infamous paladin, whose bloodied history had reached even the farthest depths of the oceans on the farthest planets. 

There was nothing he could say to that. The Blue Lion rumbled again and Allura lifted her face as though listening, although Lance could not hear or sense anything. The lion moved to shove at Allura with her nose, forcing Lance to let go, and allowed the shapeshifter to caress her muzzle. 

“She says you are hungry,” Allura said quietly. “And… in pain.”

His hand crept to his shoulder. It was not a serious injury, as he could not taste much blood, but it might be enough to attract predators in the area. If he had become injured, before, the guards would have brought him immediately to the Queen for healing. He was used to being sheltered and protected, to being treated as something fragile but also something important.

He had believed Luxia when she told him that she had made something valuable of him. Being the bride of a mer-cat, and his ability to manipulate quintessence, and his skills in the harem. He had believed her when she told him that he had been abandoned. Ill and feverish, barely lucid, something inside him had resonated with that, latching onto it as truth. He didn’t know why. He couldn’t remember why he would have felt like that, if he had come to Queen Luxia’s ocean as an air-breather, as a paladin. The Voltron paladins, from what he had been told, were closer than family, closer than lovers, mentally connected. He didn’t feel anything like that now, and hadn’t during his time at the palace either. He had felt the Blue Lion, and then only when he pushed for the connection, groping and grasping blindly. 

“Will you come with me?”

He was sure he did not have a choice, given the way his lion was fawning over Allura as if nothing had happened, but he balked anyway. “Not to the medical bay. I don’t. I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want to be poked and prodded.”

He’d hurt someone. He didn’t have a clear memory of it, he thought it had been a nightmare, but he remembered thrashing with his entire body on a cold metal table, fighting restraints at his wrists and neck and torso. Hands had been trying to pin down his tail, and he’d lashed out with all his might, his tail catching against something warm and mobile. He’d thrown it across the room. 

“Not to the medical bay. To my private chambers. I will turn off the gravity so that you can move about freely.” 

“What about the air-breath-- the humans?”

Allura caught and held his gaze. “I have not told them about my suspicions. I wanted to take care of this myself, if there was anything to take care of.”

As a true Queen would. Despite himself, he approved of her protectiveness and even her paranoia. It was a Queen’s job to protect her followers, and to judge newcomers trying to gain entry in a pod. She had not actually formally rejected him, or killed him, only tested him, which was her right. It was his duty to prove himself. 

“...alright.”

“Alright?” She looked startled, and he nodded firmly, approaching her cautiously, letting the Blue Lion’s massive head remain a barrier between them. “I will come with you. I understand that you have to guard your… followers?” He did not think air-breathers identified their social groups as pods, or that they referred to themselves as thralls.

“The paladins.” Confusion cleared from her expression. “My friends, Lance. They are my friends, not my slaves or my prisoners or my thralls. They were chosen by their lions, but they also chose to be here, and to fight with me.”

That sounded difficult to believe, but he was not interested in arguing. “Am I a prisoner?”

The Blue Lion’s tail lashed once, dismissive. 

“You are not,” was all Allura said, declining to state the obvious. Of course, it was difficult to imprison someone with a giant metal lion lurking nearby, ready to take offense. “The Castle of Lions was built for the Voltron lions and their captains. You will never be a prisoner within its walls.”

He did not think she was lying. He laid his hands against the Blue Lion’s muzzle, opposite of where Allura’s were, and tried to sound brave. “Lead the way.”

*


	4. Chapter 4

***

Allura did not bring him back to the moon pool. Instead she led the way to a different section of the Altean ship, an airlock, which gaped wide to receive them, water rushing into the open space. Lance followed her, mute and exhausted and at that strange edge where fear became meaningless. Of course he was afraid. He was numbly, blindly terrified of Allura and of her accusations, the barely checked violence in her field, the sudden shock of her wrongness when he had been expecting one of his own kind, of his own feelings and even his own memories, now suspect. None of it mattered. There was nothing else he could do now, but follow her into the airlock. Re-enter the Altean ship that had been his prison, leaving behind any faint hope of protection from his lion. Obediently accompany the Princess to-- wherever it was she wanted to take him.

She was still upset with him. He could feel it, the way quintessence boiled inside of her. Queen Luxia even at her most furious had never felt as dangerous, and it made Lance want to shrink away or flee altogether, or throw himself at her and beg for mercy, desperate to make reparations for whatever he’d done to offend.

But what he’d done to offend was exist, apparently. He didn’t know how to apologize for that, except to tuck his field and his fins in tightly, making himself a smaller target. He didn’t know if she could feel it, or if she even understood what it meant when someone deliberately dampened their aura and withdrew from any sort of natural contact. 

The Blue Lion still hovered anxiously above them both, her presence a small, steadying warmth in the back of his head. Lance wanted to beg for her intervention, wanted her to snatch him back in her jaws and carry him off to someplace safe, but to her mind the Altean ship _was_ the greatest place of safety she knew, and Allura someone that could be trusted with her precious captain’s welfare. The lion didn’t understand the nuances of all the fears racing through his tiny organic brain, thoughts and emotions branching off into the millions like tongues of lightning, there and gone before she could pin any single fluttering thought down and inspect it. He was a tiny, hot, fast creature, filled with tiny unpredictable flares of instinct and emotion, and she loved him fiercely for the way he made her logic chains branch into new and unimaginable patterns. She pushed _comfort_ and _safety_ at him, baffled that he could still find it within himself to be frightened when she, with all her strength and loyalty, was nearby. 

_Together,_ she sent consolingly, twisting in the water. _Mine, together, safe-here-good._

Lance didn’t feel safe. His stomach clenched and roiled unpleasantly, fueling a pounding ache behind his eyes. He should not have tried to channel quintessence when he was already so weak, he would be paying for it for the next few moonrises. He was so hungry it didn’t feel like hunger so much as a driving pain in his guts, like something eating away at him from the inside. Allura’s chaotic quintessence field put him on edge, expecting an outburst of violence, and all he wanted to do was shut his eyes in exhaustion and sink to the ocean floor and _not be,_ at least for a few hours. 

The airlock doors closed and sealed behind him. He did not let himself watch the sight of the open ocean shrink into nothing, his last chance to escape dwindling away. There was no real escape, here. 

Bubbles fountained up in silver gouts as the seawater began to drain away, sucked through the grates in the floor. Allura came to rest gently on her strange bare feet, standing above the waterline, her hair clinging to her wet skin. It was not so arresting now that it wasn’t free floating like a silken cloud over her neck, instead clumped like tangled seaweed and dripping everywhere. She clawed wet strands out of her eyes and gathered it in her hands to wring out, and tugged irritably at the sodden garment that now adhered itself to her skin. Her gills had disappeared, and all her scales and fins and webbing.

Now she looked like what she truly was, an air-breather. Untrustworthy, illogical, and more dangerous than any mermaid he’d ever known. The Blue Lion huffed at him silently, dismissive. _She_ was sure he wasn’t in any danger, even as the water ebbed further and took his mobility with it. 

Lance’s tail scraped over the floor’s metal grating. He tried not to cringe away from the sensation of his already torn and ragged scales being roughed up further. The bayard still strapped to his waist clunked as it came to rest against the bottom-- at least Allura hadn’t demanded he give it back. Yet. 

He lifted his head free of the water and took a breath, gills burning before he sealed them. The air inside the ship was cooler, recycled, smelling faintly of chemicals and what was probably the purification process, and he suppressed the urge to cough as it hit his lungs. The rapidly receding water sloshed around his fins, gravity pinning him heavily down against the floor, laid out on his side, his hip pressed into the uncomfortable grating and his injured shoulder protesting the strain of holding himself up. He was only at eye level with Allura’s knees, essentially prostrate and helpless before her. 

He expected-- a comment, an insult, something, but Allura did not stare down at him, instead moving briskly to the console at the wall and busying herself with it. The water around him was shallow enough to show the small spreading stain of rust red from his wound. 

He remembered lying on a hard floor like this, barely conscious, dripping blood, his scales and fins dragging over steel as he tried weakly to crawl out of the sling he must have been carried aboard in. There had been arguing voices over his head, and bright lights, everything too loud, too harsh, cold and abrasive. He’d scraped his claws across the floor, chest heaving in panic over how badly the air burned in his unaccustomed lungs, his lips peeled back from his fangs in a useless threat display. He remembered armored boots walking around him, stepping in the puddles he was leaving. He’d been bloody and slick, disgusting with dirt picked up from the floor and dried particles from the debris-heavy water where he’d been captured. Parts of his tail had already started to dry out, the scales itching and inflexible. And hands… there had been so many _hands,_ grabbing and grasping at him, armored gauntlets clutching at his skin, bruising him, holding him down... 

He flinched away from the memory and pretended it was a shiver from the cool air.

“There.” A _snap_ and the lights in the airlock changed, dimming slightly as Allura successfully reset the gravity. She kept a hand on the guardrail bolted to the wall as her feet rose off the ground, and Lance, profoundly relieved, felt the uncomfortable weight lift from him. A careful flick of his tail against the floor propelled him over to the wall to join her as the inside door slid open. 

They floated out together into the hallway, tall and imposing, lit by more of the same blue lights that had decorated the pool chamber, using the guard rails along the wall to propel themselves along. Allura had clearly done this many times in zero gravity and knew exactly where to grab and push off, while Lance shadowed her carefully, trying to pay attention through the growing haze of exhaustion. Whatever burst of energy he’d received by being near the Blue Lion seemed to have worn off now, and all he could think about was how much he hurt, and how much he wanted to curl himself into a small dark space and sleep.

“There are medical supplies in my rooms.” Allura spoke briskly into the silence, perhaps tired of waiting for him to speak first. She didn’t look back at him as she floated along, showing little sign of distress from her own injury, though he knew he’d burnt her badly. Her only concession seemed to be using her other hand to reach for the railings. “Bandages, painkillers… and I’ll have something for you to eat, as well. I know you aren’t much of a fan of the basic nutrient gel, but it should be easy on your stomach while you’re recovering.”

She paused for a response or a protest, but Lance only nodded wearily. He didn’t know what nutrient gel was but there was no point in saying so, and no point in arguing anything about her offers. There wasn’t much he could do about any of it, if she changed her mind entirely and tried to drag him to the medical bay instead, or somewhere to be imprisoned, or whatever else, aside from throwing a fit and hoping the Blue Lion would get upset on his behalf. He had a brief fantasy of the lion ripping open a hole in the ship’s armor to get at him, letting the water flood in so he could escape.

It was utterly unnerving to be floating along like this without any friction of water around him, cradling his weight and giving him something to push against. His fins twitched helplessly every time he moved, struggling to orient him, and he distracted himself as best he could by counting the hallway segments they’d gone through, although they were far past what he would have been able to navigate on his own to return to the airlock. 

A tiny thread of panic tried to shorten his breath as he thought of it, but he was too tired to entertain all the possibilities of being lost in this immense, dry, steel-plated warren designed for air-breathers. He kept his head down and pushed on. 

Part of him was surprised that they had not been met by soldiers or drones at the door, or whatever passed for appropriate security aboard an Altean ship, nor seen any servants coming and going through the hallways, disturbed by the sudden change in gravity. The ship seemed large enough to house Lance’s entire colony with plenty of space left over, but the echoing, high vaulted corridors were empty and full of shadows, dim until the lights came on in the distance ahead of them. It was not what he would have expected from a warship. 

Nor was it really appropriate for someone of Allura’s rank to be escorting him by herself. The part of him that lived and breathed harem etiquette was deeply scandalized, and even offended on Allura’s behalf. That she was capable of defending herself was not in question, she should not _have_ to. Where were her paladins, in case he really had been some sort of spy? Where were her personal guards and her attendants, her advisors? Many Queen mermaids prided themselves on their skills as healers, and indeed might have insisted on treating injuries personally, supported by their hand-picked attendants, but Allura was unmistakably a war leader, her gentler instincts ruthlessly suppressed, all of her strength and ability channeled to the cause of violence. War leaders needed delicate handling. Allura should have thralls to support her-- Queen Luxia wasn’t even a war leader, and her cohort numbered nearly twenty-five, all of her handmaidens and concubines and her most devoted companions. All of them understood their purpose in supporting the Queen, who supported the entire kingdom.

A wild and ferocious strength like Allura’s could have used double that number, to diffuse her. 

But there was no one in the halls. Despite his numb fear, Lance started to feel uneasy all over again at the pervading emptiness of the place, like he was being escorted through a mausoleum by a half-mad Queen, without kingdom, family, or collected cohort to give her existence purpose, to calm her quintessence. There were stories about such creatures.

He did not even realize they’d reached their destination until Allura caught herself at the edge of an open doorway and gestured him inside first, a soft, warm light spilling out into the hallway like a welcome. He hesitated just for a moment, and then went through. There was nowhere else for him to go.

# 

The interrogation took several hours. Allura hadn’t been lying about her quarters being private and empty, without even a hint of a servants in residence, much less a proper harem, which only made him feel more ill at ease. What did she do when she was angry, or upset, without anyone to calm her? Who did she speak to for comfort? Everyone knew that Queens were not meant to exist in a vacuum of their own emotions, especially when quintessence was involved. 

But Allura attended him alone and with every evidence of familiarity with the task: cleaning, salving, and bandaging his shoulder professionally with material that she assured him was sealed and waterproof. She didn’t even bother to dry her hair or discard her wet clothes. She pulled on a robe absently and latched a device around her wrist, a wearable with holo technology, before seeing him fed on the tasteless green nutrient gel she’d mentioned, and installed in her massive private bathing pool to soak in ocean water pumped in from the outside. 

He tried not to flinch every time her powerful, aggressively intrusive field brushed up against his tightly held one. She didn’t seem to realize she was doing it.

Then she made him go through the events of the last six months as he remembered them three times over, interrupting him constantly on small details. She wanted to establish a timeline, she said, that could be checked against Luxia’s own explanations as well as the Yellow Paladin’s observations while he’d been with the cave-dweller rebels. She fiddled with a series of small floating drones to monitor his biorhythms as he spoke, watching the incomprehensible glyphs scrolling out across the screen of her wearable and taking notes rather than staring at him, which he supposed he ought to be grateful for. She’d looked concerned over some of the early readings, although that didn’t stop the flow of questions. He was not, she’d said regretfully, well enough for her to try and use a mindmeld device to see the truth of his memories, so he had that dubious prospect to look forward to in the future. 

Lance was exhausted, his head aching from energy overuse. Allura had dimmed the lights, given him injections of painkiller to keep his concentration from splintering, but it was a losing battle. He answered question after question, hearing himself speaking as if from far away. He wouldn’t be able to lie to her like this, battered by the waves of her natural energy, even if he’d wanted to. 

He wasn’t scared of answering incorrectly any more. He wasn’t even ashamed of not being able to perform a requested duty to a Queen’s satisfaction. Maybe he’d already been judged, in Allura’s mind. She could still execute him, he supposed; it wasn’t as though the Blue Lion could reach him physically, deep inside the ship, and there was no one else around to witness. Maybe he should have asked to do this in front of the other paladins. 

Or maybe they wouldn’t protest if Allura chose to condemn him. He wondered vaguely if the lions spoke to each other or cared about their siblings’ captains. Allura had told him the lions could be deceived. Presumably she was worried about him deceiving his own lion and so deceiving the others.

She let him keep the bayard, though. Her eyes had fallen to it, but she’d said nothing as he’d let himself down into the cool saltwater. 

Lance repeated himself quietly, endlessly; many of Allura’s questions were variations of the same, obviously trying to catch him out in a lie he wasn’t capable of giving, and she was frustrated at how many times he had to repeat “I don’t know.” He had been cloistered away in the palace, in the harem, away from the general society of the kingdom except for the few illicit excursions he’d made with his sisters. He didn’t know if Queen Luxia had transformed others like she had him. He didn’t know how the Baku Garden’s influence worked, exactly, or how much of what had happened to him was because of its corruption or the Queen’s own inclinations. He didn’t know the exact date of his arrival. He didn’t know why he’d been so ready to believe Queen Luxia’s assertions that he wasn’t a warrior, that it was proper for him to stay behind and be sheltered, and that he had to work to earn that protection. 

“I would be cast out, if I wasn’t willing to be useful,” he explained again, trying to make Allura understand without angering her-- and she _was_ angry, he could feel it in her even when her voice was completely calm and she acted like she was completely focused on the medical equipment and the interrogation. Upset, perhaps, by her loss of control earlier. She’d even apologized for attacking him, her words quiet and careful while she’d worked on his bandaging. A mermaid Queen wouldn’t have bothered to apologize for attacking a perceived threat, whether it came from an apparently loyal thrall or anyone else. It was her duty to protect the pod, just as it was the duty of her thralls to serve.

Allura was still frowning but not protesting, so he went on. “It wasn’t something I was trying to escape. I had been sick-- I still _felt_ sick, I was barely strong enough to swim on my own. Anything they wanted me to do that I _could_ do, I was grateful for the chance.” 

He curled his tail closer, enough that he could anxiety groom his fins with his fingers, remembering how awful and helpless he’d felt then. Luxia and her entire cohort, harem and handmaidens and even some of her other citizens, had all cared for him around the clock, before he’d ever been given an invitation into the harem. They’d worried over him. They’d spent time exercising his muscles, helping him regain his strength, they’d groomed him and let him borrow pieces of their personal jewelry so he wouldn’t have to go unadorned in front of the Queen, they’d told him stories and taught him songs and kept him from withdrawing into his own negative thoughts. One of the oldest handmaidens, Sparaxis, the one who had started teaching him healing, had told the Queen that his feelings of isolation were more dangerous to his health than his slow physical recovery. 

The repetitive motions of his grooming were making his shoulder twinge, so he switched positions, turning moodily in the water and wishing, selfishly, for his collection of sponges and scale-rasps. Gifts from his harem siblings and even a few from admirers; all beyond his reach now. “They didn’t ask me if I wanted to be a warrior, but it wasn’t-- I didn’t feel any kind of _lack._ I was small, unsuited for combat, and we didn’t need more fighters anyway. We weren’t at war. The Queen liked to sponsor healers, artists, performers.” He bit his lip. “And I... was happy to be useful. I didn’t mind the things that they asked me to do.” 

No one had ever walked him through what might happen if he didn’t integrate himself, of course, but no one had ever needed to. Queen Luxia had taken a personal interest in him, installed him in her harem. There were expectations for him. Luxia’s kingdom was well-protected and had the resources to support-- temporarily-- those who fell ill or became injured, like himself; there were many more smaller pods that were nomadic, warrior-driven, with only their Queen’s force of personality to hold her thralls together through battles for territory and hunting rights. Pods like those would abandon anyone who couldn’t keep up, and violently reject anyone who wasn’t willing to obey.

Lance had been very lucky. Recovering in Luxia’s bower and surrounded by content, well-cared for thralls, he’d understood that it was not his place to ask too many questions or to try and leave as soon as he could swim. He was not supposed to want to leave. A Queen wasn’t a Queen if she couldn’t hold on to her followers and impress upon them that she was the most responsible, the best choice to lead a small pod or an entire kingdom, the best candidate to care for their needs.

And of course once he’d shown a talent for manipulating quintessence, there was no question that he would be let go. His needs included a need to be mentored. He could have ended up like Allura, untaught, acting on him like a gravitational pull without even realizing she was doing it. 

“Unsuited for combat,” Allura repeated. Her fingers clenched on the little scanning wand she’d been holding, and Lance watched her white knuckles with some trepidation, not sure what part of that had set her off. He _was_ small compared to the muscle-bound warriors that guarded the palace. He’d been courted by enough of them to know.

“Luxia said that to you?”

“Sparaxis did-- one of the Queen’s healers.” Lance remembered feeling vaguely ashamed about it, for some reason, but even more grateful to be told that he’d be staying in the harem with those who had already become his friends and learning to help them with their daily duties. “She said I was too young, in any case.”

A grim expression took over Allura’s face, echoing the roil in her field. That was upsetting to her. “Tell me about the disappearances,” she commanded after a moment, clipped. 

His throat abruptly tightened with the urge to keen. Blindsided, Lance had to turn his face away entirely, water sloshing in the bath as he stifled himself. He’d been happy to be useful, yes, while his sisters vanished one by one and no one said anything.

Those handmaidens had been kind to him. Florona had been kind to him, and he had looked blankly over her empty nest in the harem without curiosity, unthinking and unquestioning. Her space at the grand table had gone empty. It seemed impossible now that they could have ignored her absence, and the absence of the others, vanishing one at a time like jewelfish from a dying reef, but they had ignored it. Perhaps they’d been encouraged to ignore it, lulled to complacency by the drugging effects of the food they were eating and their perfect confidence in Queen Luxia’s authority, but that didn’t make them any less guilty. 

The rebels had noticed. The rebels had _left,_ afraid for their lives. Lance had heard the stories of refugees fleeing to other, neighboring pods without ever connecting the dots. Some of the dissenters had stayed nearby in the warren of caves, unwilling to abandon their home and their people entirely, but all of them had sensed some fundamental wrongness and pinned it to the Queen. 

Allura did not interrupt him. She let him talk until the flood of words-- confession-- slowed on its own to a trickle, and then into silence. 

“Luxia was the one who told me about the guardian spirit of the waters,” Lance said softly, eventually. Daring to leave off his mistress’s title. He felt scraped raw all over again, as if every word leaving his mouth had been a scale plucked free, leaving him bleeding and exposed and unarmored. 

“She knew what the lion was built for-- she encouraged me to help it awaken, to learn to commune with it so that it could protect our kingdom. She said that’s what she wanted me to do.” He looked up at Allura helplessly. “The Baku Garden couldn’t have _wanted_ that to happen.” 

“Perhaps not.” Allura’s tone was almost gentle; she’d stopped taking notes on her wearable while he spoke. Her slim brown fingers were unmoving on the glowing, projected keypad. “Perhaps, in her own way, she was trying to use you to protect her citizens.” 

The Yellow Paladin had tried to protect her citizens. He hadn’t needed to be used; he’d listened to the rebels when they stole him from the palace in the middle of the night and left Lance behind. Impossible to take both of them, they’d said. The air-breather with blue armor had been invited to Queen Luxia’s chambers that night. 

Lance had no memory of any of that, of course.

Allura dismissed both her wearable’s holoscreen and her brief softness. “And yet, I can’t imagine that she thought you would do a better job of fighting off the Baku Garden creature while drugged, amnesiac, and-- changed.” 

She didn’t just mean his tail and his fins. Allura had been incredulous, angry even, over the halting-- and abridged-- description he’d given of his duties in the palace. A Paladin of Voltron, reduced to a body servant. Obediently scrubbing treasure rooms and carrying the Queen’s crown for her, sitting complacently by the side of her throne. Taking food from her hand. Warming her bed. Whatever Lance hadn’t said aloud, Allura had read between the lines. There was no need for her to say that Lance the human would not have done such things, or been capable of them. Part of Lance’s duties in the Queen’s retinue specifically involved being _quiet._

“Not that he wouldn’t have loved the idea of being kidnapped into an alien harem,” Allura had muttered darkly. 

It was more than that. A Paladin of Voltron who had simply swallowed all those lies, and allowed himself and his lion, a divine weapon, to be brought under a foreign authority and then not even used. 

To be duped and lied to, and played with, while the Baku Garden devoured innocent lives. 

Lance said nothing, aching. 

“In any case, the preliminary medical scans seem to lean towards the conclusion that you are who you say you are.” For some reason Allura didn’t sound all that pleased about it. The little medical drones had been hooked up to the larger console on the wall, and their information now played out on multiple holoscreens running in parallel to show comparisons. Lance couldn’t read a word of it.

“The data matches what we were able to compile from your previous scans, within certain parameters. This is the third time we’ve had to re-calibrate our equipment for-- unexpected physiological deviations.” Some reaction skittered through her field at the pause between words, unclear. “The healing pods are out of the question until we get more comprehensive medical profiles put together for all of you.”

That, by contrast, was old fashioned frustration. The air-breather Lance had babbled on the recording about healing pods and their function, and also about one that had tried to eat him. Lance wasn’t unhappy about not being shoved into some kind of claustrophobic freezer capsule that apparently glitched regularly. He would rather wear a dry, scratchy air-breather bandage now and working on healing the injury himself later on, when he was stronger.

Allura scraped a hand through her hair, which had dried to an unruly mess and made his fingers itch for a comb. “I’m still going to run a few more evaluations. We didn’t do a full battery of tests when we brought you in the first time, we didn’t think there was a need to. And with everything else going wrong--”

She stopped herself, field spiking, and Lance held his breath, wary of sudden movements and ready to push himself away from her. 

The Blue Lion rumbled softly inside his head, somewhere distant, and surprised Lance with an out of nowhere sense-memory of nauseating freefall, being spun and twisted through a wormhole, system alarms shrieking, voices shrieking, a sense of togetherness being torn apart. Allura’s voice was in there as well, crying out.

 _Lions, scattered._ The Blue Lion gave him an impression of battle exhaustion, frustration and anger, anxiety for her captain, anxiety for her siblings, and a deep nameless dread stealing into the link that bound them all together. The lions were not well acquainted with fear for their own sakes, but they understood negative causes, negative effects. _Defeated. Lost. Dizzy-hurts-alone._

 _Hurts?_ he queried, alarmed, but the Blue Lion had already shifted the impression, singing her frustration at communicating on an organic’s level. Not _her_ hurt. Not _her_ dizzy-sick-scared. Someone else’s.

“I will need a few more samples.” Allura’s voice, calmer, distant in his ear while his brain was trying to be in two places at once. “This will pinch a little, Lance. May I have your arm?”

He was not sure if he moved his arm to oblige her, but he felt the sting from far away, felt himself flinch. _Hurts?_ he pressed again, demanding; Sparaxis had been very clear about a healer’s obligations no matter the circumstances, even a half-trained junior like himself. Was someone else onboard injured? 

_Hurts,_ the Blue Lion agreed, as if it had been a question. Her mental presence swam with sadness but also a tinge of resignation, like this was something to be expected. Then, changeable as a shoal switching directions, she pushed a patronizing sort of concern at him, annoyed that he was still awake because he was keeping her awake, his anxiousness pushing her to patrol around the ship like a hovering species of parent. 

_Hurts,_ he tried again, while Allura was-- oh, Allura was speaking to someone now over the comm system, a male with a loud cheery voice that Lance remembered from the awful singing recordings. She was arguing, giving orders, but the cadence of the words didn’t seem like an emergency, and they weren’t directed at Lance. He let that drop out and tried to get his lion to focus.

Who seemed to think he was talking about _himself,_ the Blue Lion poked at his memories of Allura dressing his shoulder and reproachfully hinted that it wasn’t a very bad wound at all, a few little scrapes. She had fought off a giant alien beast recently, she was full of scrapes and scratches and no one was gluing bandages to her. _Strength-dutiful-I,_ she said primly, if a magic robotic cat could be prim. 

Concentrating on _dizzy-sick-scared_ didn’t get him anything either. The Blue Lion warbled a mournful, echoing note out in the water, unheard except inside his head, and sent him another incomprehensible image: lions disappearing into swirling, nauseating wheels of light, tumbling end over end. 

“Lance. Lance, are you listening to me?”

He blinked back to himself. Allura was across the room now, standing over at her console and looking back at him. She’d taken the medical drones with her, she must’ve finished with her samples and her conversation while he wasn’t paying attention.

“I’m-- yes.” He fluffed out his fins and resettled them to clear his head. 

“I’m needed in the infirmary. I don’t have time to take you back to the pool area you were in before. Is the bath here big enough for you to stay in for a few vargas?”

He didn’t know how long a varga was, but the bath was more the size of a small, shallow lagoon and adequate to his needs. He nodded, surprised that she would be so willing to leave him alone in her personal quarters-- except of course, without a lack of gravity to give him mobility, he wasn’t in much of a position to go rummaging around. He could stay in the water or flop around uselessly on the floor.

“Alright. The computer’s voice-activated, just tell it if you need anything and it’ll do its best to comply,” she told him, distracted, darting out into the other area of her chambers. He heard the wet plop of her shift hit the floor; changing her clothes. “You should try to rest, and eat something more. The painkillers are supposed to be taken with food. _Don’t_ scratch at the bandage.”

“I won’t, mistress.” It slipped out; a natural reaction to the authority in her voice.

“Don’t call me mistress.” She paused to glare at him through the doorway, lovely even in irritation, and was gone.

#

He _did_ sleep, he was too tired for that to be anything but an immediate necessity the moment there wasn’t a torrent of questions and emotionally charged conversation keeping him awake. The lights were still dimmed low, and the water was cool and soothing. Lance found a spot that seemed to be made for reclining in the shallow water, choosing to push aside his instinct to find the deepest, darkest corner to cower in, and settled himself down. The Blue Lion sang softly to him, giving him the rushing sound of a not so distant surf and the murmuring currents that swept around the reefs, all the little noises of a living ocean. 

It wasn’t the same as the sounds of the palace, of home, but it was close enough that he fell asleep almost instantly, the drugs in his system pulling him down. 

The lights were still low when he came awake gasping, disoriented from dreams that slipped away even as he tried to remember them. A pulsing light, and slick, oily warmth slowly creeping up the length of his body. A pale hand protruding from the half-closed mouth of the great blue clam. Unsettled, Lance flared his fins and spines, whipping his tail around with enough force to raise a small wave across the surface of the pool, reseating himself in his own body.

It was impossible to tell how long he’d slept. He felt sluggish and heavy, his shoulder aching and his stomach rumbling, and he thought it had been longer, perhaps, than Allura had meant to leave him alone. The water in the bathing pool had been sitting long enough for the clean, living taste to fade, though it wasn’t yet stale. 

_Beloved?_ he tried, but the Blue Lion only rumbled faintly in the very back of his mind. Sleeping herself, or whatever equivalent the Lions of Voltron exercised. The bathing chamber and the rooms beyond were silent, empty. 

It seemed like he was on his own.

“Computer, lights up,” he commanded, repeating what Allura had said to turn them down. The fixtures on the wall brightened obligingly. If he was going to be left to his own devices with no orders besides to take more medicine and feed himself, he was going to get _clean_ at last. 

The bath had a wealth of supplies: sponges and soft cloths, abrasives, cleansers in every possible color, scented oils and soaps in beautifully wrought containers, so many different kinds he didn’t feel guilty about using whatever he wanted. He scrubbed himself thoroughly, and then again, and then again using all different sets of sponges and brushes, determinedly cleaning away all the scents of sickness and terror that still clung to him like thick, scummy algae, fouling the water immediately around him. The healing rooms in the palace were all chosen for the gentle currents that flowed through them, the better to carry away such distressing scents. Lingering in a contained pool like this reminded him of his sickbed, too weak to attend his own hygiene.

The abrasives scraped his skin raw but he felt better for doing it, going over and over until he felt _clean,_ once more. Then it was on to the ugly, fading scales that made him grimace just to look at, setting his jaw to pluck out the ones that he could reach on his own and ignoring the tiny trails of blood he was leaving in the water. 

In the harem he’d never had to do this on his own. There was always a brother or sister willing to fuss affectionately over him, to braid pearls and beads into his short hair, and polish his scales, and help him care for his fins. He’d always felt better after being groomed, especially in the early days when he’d just risen from his sickbed; after so long spent as a sickly, unattractive invalid he’d finally felt fully engaged and presentable again, ready to be taken seriously with his scales bright and glossy and borrowed jewelry glittering invitingly. It was, his harem siblings had whispered encouragingly, the only armor he would need while the Queen and the council decided his fate. Courtesy, a winning smile, and beautiful scales could secure his future. They were sure he would be found pleasing and valuable, and be allowed to stay. 

Lance set the soiled water to drain so he could refill the bath with new saltwater. There were mirrors placed at convenient angles all around the opulent bathing chamber, which would have helped him as he polished his scales as best he could on his own, if only he could bring himself to meet his own gaze in the mirrors. He was not sure what he would see, if he looked now: an exiled thrall desperate to gain acceptance with a new pod and a new Queen, or an unwilling prisoner beyond all hope of rescue, or an air-breather wearing the wrong body. He was not sure he wanted to see any hint of the Blue Paladin, despite the weapon that still hung at his side. 

He touched it gingerly, but it remained inert in its strange shape. The hilt seemed to slide into his palm like water, fitting perfectly, and as alien as it seemed he didn’t want to set it aside. The weight of it was comforting. It was still a weapon, even if he couldn’t work out how to use it, and if it didn’t feel like it belonged to him, exactly, he could sense faintly that it was tied to the Blue Lion. The Blue Lion would make her opinions known if she _didn’t_ want him to carry it for any reason, surely. It was part of her regalia.

There was armor that was meant to go with it, he remembered suddenly. The others had all been wearing armor. Air-breather armor, magical transforming armor. Lance had brought nothing from Queen Luxia’s palace except for the scraps of broken jewelry he’d been wearing, but that armor couldn’t have been left behind if the bayard was here. It had to be somewhere in the castle. The mirrors positioned all around the bathing chamber gave him a limited view of the rest of Allura’s quarters, including a glass covered capsule that unmistakably held armor, or at least an armored sort of spacesuit. It resembled the paladins’ armor too closely to be anything else. One might assume, then, that his own armor was kept in his rooms-- in the rooms of that other, stranger Lance. 

It seemed outrageous for a Queen and her warriors to maintain their own armor in such a fashion. Did they sit and scrub it after each use? Did they patch it themselves, and hammer out the dents and buff out the scratches, as the servants of the warrior caste did?

A trundling little drone brought him more of the unappetizing bland green goo that passed for food here and a packet of foul tasting medicine, which at least did its work quickly. He eyed the small robot dubiously, apparently the only “servant” available here. Even a war Queen, deliberately depriving herself of comforts and privilege for the sake of her campaign, would have better. To someone used to the singing of handmaidens echoing from walls of polished coral and the soft, hushed murmurs of the harem, out of sight, awaiting their Queen’s pleasure, this was almost disrespectful. 

Maybe a robot was more discreet, more easily left in the company of someone who could be dangerous. Maybe. Or maybe it was all that Allura had available, if her paladins did not serve her, in this unpopulated relic of a castle. The emptiness of the grand rooms seemed sad and discomfiting to him, as did the thought of Allura on her knees in this very chamber, her hair messy and unpinned, wearing her white shift, scrubbing away at her own armor like a scullery servant.

Lance’s fingers contracted around the hilt of the bayard. He didn’t have time to dwell on that. He had to decide, and soon, if he was truly going to resign himself to staying here with this fearsome servant-less Queen and her terrifying cadre of aliens, throwing himself on her fickle mercy, or if he would choose to continue his exile. 

Free of Allura’s overpowering influence he could _think_ again, and the prospect of escape pulled at him like a riptide. The memory of her initial kindness-- those few brief moments before she’d accused him of being an imposter-- was overshadowed by the fury and uncontrolled emotions she’d shown when she lost her temper. She’d touched him with such gentleness that it made him ache to remember, and all he’d wanted to do was throw himself into her arms and let her take care of him, but the truth was that she didn’t want him here. She wanted her Blue Paladin back, certainly, but she didn’t want _him._ The idea of staying, of being put through more interrogations, was almost as frightening as the idea of defying her and trying to escape. She would be furious. She would be rightfully furious, and there would be no reason for her to hold back on a punishment. 

But. But. If he could just make it back to the open ocean, he would be able to disappear. He had seen the shallows give way to deeper, darker waters full of corals and caves where he could hide. He wasn’t completely helpless, and his arm would mend; he would be able to feed himself. He would still be an exile, perhaps alone in an uninhabited ocean, but he would no longer be a prisoner, and the Blue Lion was, after all, a warship in her own right. He could travel with her. He could go where he wished. 

He had never expected to be left alone like this, or to even be given the opportunity to consider making a dash for freedom. In the pool room he would never have been able to reach the console that operated the door, much less figure out how to use the moon pool to get outside, but now he knew how to manipulate the gravity in the rooms and corridors. It wouldn’t be easy, but all he truly had to do was find the nearest airlock. The Blue Lion could assist him, if she could see all the ports of entry from outside the ship. There had to be a place where she was getting in and out herself.

Of course, that was all assuming the Blue Lion would be willing to help him leave. She was the one who had insisted on the castle ship as a place of safety and who had, tellingly, refused to interfere with his confrontation with Allura until after he’d already been attacked. He bit his lip, wavering. What if he tried to escape and the Blue Lion refused to follow him? What if she abandoned him to remain with her own mistress? In the vastness of an alien ocean, his best chance for survival would be in the company of a guardian spirit. Or worse, what if he tried to leave and she prevented him, calling attention to his escape, or snapping him up inside her jaws and returning him to his prison?

Going without her was impossible. Finding her had been the one thing that made Lance feel like he was finally, truly awake and alive, after his long wasting sickness. Even when he was recovering, trying to integrate himself into palace society, he’d been plagued by restless, disjointed dreams with flashes of incomprehensible images: memories of wind whistling, rushing past him as he fell endlessly through a stormy sky, glowing, lamp-like golden eyes, a limp body floating unmoored through a black space without stars. Something calling for him in the depths, shadowy and immense. 

He’d deliberately not spoken of this to Allura. He hadn’t wanted to tell her, of all people, how terrified he’d been of the images. Terrified, not understanding what any of it meant, and half-convinced that it didn’t mean anything at all, that it was only feverish delusions concocted by his unwell mind. He’d hoped desperately that the images would go away if he could just manage to ignore them, dismiss them, focus on the small realities of the day to day.

But the dreams only seemed to get more vivid, growing stronger as he did, and they didn’t go away. As he recovered enough to leave his sickbed in the Queen’s bower he understood, with a resigned sort of horror, that he was going to go to the thing that was calling him. He had no choice but to go to it. 

It is a great spirit of the waters, Queen Luxia had whispered in his ear, her hands soothing his extended spines and fins as he stared out at the great shadowy blackness beyond the lights of the mermaid city, unable to sleep for the voices in his head. An ancient guardian from the time of heroes and god-kings. It calls to you because you are its chosen. 

Chosen for what, he’d wanted to ask, but he’d been trying to be good and meek and accepting, not wanting to admit that he didn’t want its attentions, didn’t want to be something dangerous and special when he was only just learning how to be ordinary again. Queen Luxia seemed delighted that such a creature would invade his dreams and frighten him half to death with its cryptic, incomprehensible psychic messages. She’d given him his first gift of jewels for it, a beautiful strand of sapphires on a delicate silver chain, long enough to drape twice around his slim hips. She’d pressed it into his hands and kissed his temple, and told him it had been given as a courting gift to her mother’s mother, who had not been a Queen then but a concubine of the harem. She’d told him that when the time came, he would have to go to the thing waiting for him out in the dark, alone. 

She’d told him to be brave. She’d told him that he was more than his fears, his weakness, his shattered memories. She’d told him that she believed in him and what he would be able to do for the people he cared about, how he would be able to protect, to safeguard. He clenched his fists. 

He would be brave again, and escape this place.

*


End file.
